Food crisis in the modern world: Causes and possible consequences for Ukraine

The prevention of the emergence and escalation of food crises in each country depended on the timely identification of their characteristic warning signs in order to protect food security. The study aimed to identify and summarise the causes and consequences of food crises in Ukraine and worldwide for preventing their occurrence and mitigating their negative impacts. The study revealed the specific features of the systemic vulnerability of food systems. It substantiated that the multidimensional and multidirectional nature of simultaneous global crises (financial, energy, environmental) created a synergistic polycrisis, with the food crisis as one of its components. Using the Ishikawa diagram, it was identified the cause-and-effect relationships leading to Ukraine’s food crisis and structure the causes into major categories. The article established that potential causes of a food crisis and declining food security in Ukraine may include: the unresolved consequences of past crises; the global pandemic; manifestations of global economic shocks (rising world food prices, slowdown in agricultural production growth, declining global grain reserves, high energy prices, global population growth); the environmental crisis and extreme weather events; wars; local sectoral crises, such as the crisis in the dairy industry. Between 2020 and 2024, amid the COVID-19 pandemic and russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, global food prices rose 2.7-fold, while wheat stocks fell to 272 million tonnes in 2023/2024 period. The results of the study showed that, given the existing agricultural, industrial, innovative, and scientific-production potential, the occurrence of critical famine in Ukraine was possible only under artificially created challenges: wars causing destruction of arable land, seizure of harvests, restricted access to food; global man-made and environmental disasters. Theoretical, methodological, and applied provisions regarding the causes and potential consequences of food crises in the modern world can serve as a source of scientific information for the development of food security strategies and programmes