The world is not running out of food. It is running out of ways to move it. That is the warning from agricultural economists as two wars, one involving Iran and the other Ukraine, collide with forecasts of a "super" El Niño weather pattern that could scramble harvests across multiple continents in the coming year.

The combination is pushing global food security toward a crisis that looks less like the famines of decades past and more like a logistics failure playing out on a planetary scale. Shipping lanes are under threat, ports are contested, and the weather systems that farmers rely on to plan planting and harvests are becoming dangerously unpredictable.

"The food does exist, the availability does exist," said Shawn Arita, an associate research professor at North Dakota State University who studies agricultural trade. "The main issue currently speaking is that the movement is broken."

Two Wars, One Fragile System

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has already reshaped global grain markets since 2022, knocking one of the world's largest wheat and corn exporters out of normal trading rhythms and forcing buyers in Africa, the Middle East and Asia to scramble for alternative suppliers. Black Sea shipping routes, once a reliable corridor for grain bound for import-dependent nations, have been repeatedly disrupted by attacks, blockades and insurance costs that make some vessels unwilling to sail.

Now a second conflict, centered on Iran, is adding pressure to an already strained system. The Middle East sits astride critical maritime chokepoints and serves as a transit hub for goods moving between Asia, Europe and Africa. Disruptions there ripple outward, raising freight costs, lengthening delivery times and forcing shippers to reroute around danger zones, all of which make food more expensive and harder to deliver to the places that need it most.

Neither war has destroyed the world's capacity to grow food. But both have demonstrated how quickly a handful of contested shipping lanes and export terminals can turn abundance in one region into scarcity in another.

A Super El Niño on the Horizon

Layered on top of the geopolitical strain is a climatic one. Forecasters are warning of a super El Niño, an intensified version of the periodic warming of Pacific Ocean waters that reshapes weather patterns worldwide. Past El Niño events have brought drought to parts of Asia, Australia and southern Africa while triggering flooding in South America, disrupting planting seasons and shrinking harvests in some of the world's most agriculturally important regions.

Historically, the world's food system has shown remarkable resilience to climate shocks. The so-called green revolution of the late twentieth century, driven by high-yield wheat and rice varieties, fertilizer and irrigation, allowed food production to outpace population growth for decades. But agricultural scientists have long warned that this progress has limits. Cropland is finite, water resources are strained, and yields in many regions plateaued years ago. A severe El Niño arriving amid two active conflicts leaves far less slack in the system to absorb the shock.

Distribution, Not Production, Is the Bottleneck

What distinguishes the current moment from past food crises, experts say, is that the world is not confronting an absolute scarcity of grain, oilseeds or other staples. Warehouses in exporting countries hold reserves. Farms in North America, South America and parts of Asia are still producing at scale. The emerging danger is that food cannot reliably get from where it is grown to where it is eaten.

War zones close ports. Insurance premiums on cargo ships spike when routes pass near conflict areas, and some carriers refuse to sail at all. Fuel costs rise when maritime traffic is forced onto longer detours. Each of these frictions adds time and expense to a system that low-income, import-dependent countries can least afford to absorb.

"The food does exist, the availability does exist. The main issue currently speaking is that the movement is broken," said Arita.

That distinction matters for how governments and aid organizations respond. A production shortfall calls for planting more acres or developing hardier crop varieties, solutions that take seasons or years to bear fruit. A logistics crisis calls for different tools: securing shipping corridors, diversifying trade routes, and building emergency stockpiles closer to vulnerable populations. Confusing the two risks wasting scarce resources on the wrong fix.

Who Bears the Cost

The countries most exposed are typically those that rely heavily on imports to feed their populations and lack the foreign currency reserves or infrastructure to absorb sudden price spikes or delivery delays. Many of these nations are in Africa and parts of Asia, regions that have already weathered repeated food-security shocks in recent decades, from drought and civil conflict to previous disruptions in global grain markets.

Aid organizations warn that even a modest delay in shipments, compounded by an El Niño-driven harvest failure in a key producing region, could be enough to push millions of additional people into acute food insecurity. The danger is not a single catastrophic event but an accumulation of smaller disruptions, a blocked strait here, a failed monsoon there, that together overwhelm a system with little remaining slack.

For now, economists like Arita argue the priority should be clear: the world does not need to grow more food in the immediate term. It needs to move the food it already has.