The long-term threats to global food security go far beyond Ukraine

In the Middle Ages, people knew from bitter experience that war and pestilence usually ride together with another horseman: famine.

"We face an unprecedented global hunger crisis," UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned last month. "In the past two years, the number of severely food‑insecure people around the world has more than doubled to 276 million. There is a real risk that multiple famines will be declared in 2022. And 2023 could be even worse."

The deal between Russia and Ukraine to unblock the Black Sea ports brought a ray of hope as the week closed.

"Canada's confidence in Russia's reliability is pretty much nil," said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Friday. "They have demonstrated nothing but poor faith."

But, he added, "we are optimistic."

Relief can't come soon enough in some places.

Food prices have risen across the world — but in Sri Lanka in May, food already cost an average of 57 per cent more than it did just a year earlier, pushing 30 per cent of households into hunger and leading to a public uprising that brought the government crashing down. Since then, things have only grown more desperate.

Local factors in Sri Lanka — such as a ban on the importation of fertilizers — aggravated global factors like the war in Ukraine.

But across the world, those temporary disruptions are playing out against a backdrop of ominous trends that threaten the world's ability to feed itself in the long term. And Canada is not immune to those trends.

The Canadian census of agriculture revealed this year that farmland in Ontario in 2021 was lost to development at a rate of 319 acres a day — about 240 NFL football fields. That rate of loss is more than three times what it was in the last census in 2016.

Human settlements tend to emerge in places where food can be grown. As they expand, they sprawl over that good farmland.

Mark Reusser raises turkeys and grows crops in Waterloo County, Ont. and is vice-president of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture.

"About 5 per cent of Ontario's land mass is suitable for agriculture," he told CBC News. "The rest is Canadian shield and wetlands and boreal forest, and there really isn't soil or climate to grow crops. So we have this kind of a conflict of interest where people want to live in the same place where there's good farmland and good climate for growing crops.

"Farmland itself is a non-renewable natural resource. When you pave it over, it's gone forever. On the other hand, if you look after it, it's potentially a perpetual resource in that it can grow food forever. We live in a place here in southwestern Ontario ... where crops like corn and beans and squash have been grown for over a thousand years."