Food insecurity abroad harms Americans at home

When ISIS swept across the Middle East last decade, it relied on more than just ideological persuasion to recruit new fighters. Militants offered food supplies to Syrian and Iraqi families whose sons and husbands were willing to enlist in the growing terror group.

Such enticements were powerful only because of the state of famine and food insecurity that was ravaging those lands. Today, the world is experiencing an even greater bout of food insecurity, creating conditions that could supercharge a new global crisis. 

Since 2019, the number of people facing acute food insecurity has risen to 345 million — a dramatic increase from 135 million since 2019.  Tragically, 49 million people are now on the brink of famine. The crisis hits children hardest — as many as 13.6 million children are suffering from wasting, and 2.6 to 3.6 million face nutritional stunting. This disaster is showing no sign of abating and threatens to take the lives of millions.  

The current food insecurity crisis could spark a chain reaction, as hungry people revolt, fight, and relocate. Today’s violence in Sudan is just the most recent case. If the crisis deepens into a full-on civil war, we could see contagion from massive migration outflows destabilize more governments. War and ungoverned spaces create breeding grounds for ISIS, Boko Haram, and Al-Qaeda to recruit more terror fighters and fundraise off the chaos. This will not stay in far-off lands for long.   

Consider the West’s migration crises. According to the World Food Program, refugee outflows from famine-stricken areas increase by 2 percent for every year of food insecurity. Hunger in Latin America increased by 8 percent from 2019 to 2021, afflicting an additional 11 million people — just another reason more than six million migrants have flocked to our border since Biden’s election.

Helping friendly governments supply adequate food to their populations prevents them from falling into unfriendly hands. It also deprives terrorist organizations of fertile recruiting grounds and disrupts some of the migrant flows that help mask terrorists moving with them. That means fewer attacks at home and against U.S. citizens and servicemembers abroad. 

This matters for great power competition too. American leadership in food security and trade helps position Washington as the partner of choice for countries that may otherwise gravitate toward Beijing or Moscow. We are losing the influence war in places like Africa and Latin America, and badly. Bringing solutions to dire challenges such as food insecurity will bolster the United States’ standing and advance our interests as we compete with China in the decades to come. 

Instead of just giving food aid out to developing countries, we can develop our own market-based solutions and expand economic investment to replace China’s predatory loans and compete with Beijing’s economic statecraft. To be clear, we shouldn’t just give aid and walk away. Rather, we should make sure American companies — not Chinese ones — are positioned to benefit from stronger trade ties. 

One path to achieving greater food security and expanding U.S. market share is through investments in increasing crop yield. Washington should improve market incentives for hydroponic and vertical farming, which are already revolutionizing agricultural practices.  These cultivation methods, which reduce soil usage and use specialized software and sensors to optimize plant growth, maximize farm space while using only one-tenth of the water required for traditional farming practices.  

Government efforts to level the playing field — including with tax incentives, elimination of regulatory hurdles, and reformed procurement policies — can help expedite the adoption of such technologies. 

Hydroponic farming is of particular interest to countries with harsh climates, little arable land, and meager financial resources — many of which are highly prone to Chinese predations.  Meanwhile, the crops that emerge are meeting or exceeding the nutritional value of those from conventional farming methods.  An American-led hydroponic revolution will position American farmers to earn tremendous financial gains as they export these technologies across the world. 

Basic agricultural research has a tremendous return on investment. For every two cents that U.S. taxpayers spend on international agricultural research investments to improve outcomes such as crop yield, we also see 100 dollars of benefit to the U.S. economy.  Helping partner countries develop their agricultural sectors with optimal cultivation methods and technologies helps American farmers improve their own practices as well. As developing countries grow wealthier, they buy more U.S.-made products too, from tractors to cars to refrigerators.  

The other main impediment to poor countries and their farmers is a lack of capital. The U.S. should build out a Western-led dedicated food security fund, which could be joined by Arab states interested in containing the rise of poverty-induced extremism in Africa and beyond.

Such a fund should be separate from the bureaucratic morass endemic to UN and World Bank efforts. It should instead adopt the best practices from venture capital and micro-loan firms to rapidly deploy capital to vetted agricultural projects in vulnerable countries. Over time, successful projects will pay back these loans to fund even more investments, paying for itself.

This approach would create opportunities for American agro-tech firms to expand their reach while ensuring partner countries have a vested interest in the success of capacity-building and infrastructure development projects.  U.S. farmers would also enjoy greater market access — especially if these initiatives are coupled with negotiations on sharing these technologies and equipment as bilateral trade agreements are developed. 

America has earned good will across the world by feeding hundreds of millions of hungry and starving people. But we’ve largely failed by focusing on giving handouts instead of empowering local economies and teaching them to farm more efficiently.

By increasing the competitiveness of innovative American agro-tech products and providing foreign markets with the starting capital to acquire it, we can make lasting change abroad, bring prosperity to farmers at home, and earn the trust of partners who will prefer to trade with the United States instead of China. 

Morgan D. Ortagus is the founder of Polaris National Security. She previously served as the spokesperson for the State Department under Secretary Michael R. Pompeo and began her career at the U.S. Agency for International Development.