Global food security is heading toward one of its most dangerous stretches in years, India’s external affairs minister S. Jaishankar said on 29 September, pointing to fertiliser shortages, war-disrupted shipping routes and capital flight from developing economies. Speaking to the Asia Society in New York, Jaishankar said a major global food crisis was likely within months. He linked the risk to the wars in Ukraine and the Gulf, both of which have disrupted grain exports and energy flows that poorer economies depend on.
Jaishankar told his audience that fertiliser shortages were already visible in global markets, well ahead of the planting seasons that would be hit hardest. Black Sea shipping corridors remain unreliable three years into the Ukraine war, and Gulf tensions have added pressure on energy and fertiliser supply chains running through the region. The two pressures compound each other: fertiliser production is energy-intensive, so disruption to gas flows quickly becomes disruption to food supply.
He also raised a less visible risk. Investors have been pulling capital out of developing economies into perceived safe havens, he said, leaving governments less able to cushion citizens against price shocks. Combined with politically driven decisions that inflate prices, this leaves the Global South carrying a disproportionate share of a crisis it did not cause.
A warning aimed at wealthier nations
Jaishankar’s sharpest words were reserved for richer countries. Nations should not be “so self-centred” that they retreat into their own priorities while the consequences land on others, he said. Progress against the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals is already behind schedule, and a fresh food shock would push it further off track.
The timing of the remarks is notable. They landed a day after the UN marked the International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste on 29 September, an observance meant to highlight that roughly a third of food produced worldwide is lost or wasted even as hunger rises elsewhere. Jaishankar did not reference the day directly, but his warning sits inside the same argument: existing food systems are fragile enough that shocks in one region now travel quickly to others, including Gulf states already warning about supply-chain exposure.
Fertiliser and fuel are the pinch points
Agricultural economists have long flagged fertiliser as a leading indicator of food stress, because nitrogen fertiliser production depends heavily on natural gas. When gas prices spike or supply is disrupted, fertiliser costs rise within weeks, and food prices tend to follow within a season. That sequence played out during the initial Ukraine invasion in 2022, when global fertiliser prices roughly tripled before easing over the following two years.
Jaishankar did not put a figure on how large a price shock might follow this time, and no independent forecast has yet quantified it. What he did offer was a call to action: policymakers, he said, need to plan now rather than react once shortages are visible in supermarkets. For countries such as India, which import a significant share of their fertiliser, and for Gulf states dependent on food imports, that message carries particular weight.
Whether governments heed the warning before the crisis he describes actually arrives is, for now, an open question. Jaishankar’s own ministry has previously pushed for expanded fertiliser stockpiling agreements between India and supplier nations, a policy line that fits the argument he made in New York: countries able to plan ahead should be doing so now, while shortages remain a forecast rather than a lived reality for most consumers. For India, which imports a substantial share of its fertiliser, that is a direct input cost affecting tens of millions of farming households.
Diplomats at the event described his tone as more urgent than in previous remarks on food security, several of which focused on India’s own self-sufficiency programmes rather than the global picture. Framing the risk in global terms suggests New Delhi sees value in building international pressure ahead of any shortage materialising.
