The era of scarcity: Climate change threatens the future of food

Last May, the Japanese Minister of Agriculture resigned after commenting that he never bought rice because his supporters gave it to him. Taku Eto’s petulance wouldn’t have generated so much public unrest if it weren’t for the fact that rice is scarce in the country and its price has doubled in just a few months. Japan is experiencing a severe crisis with this staple grain, to the point that the government has released 500,000 tons from national reserves to curb rising costs.

Among the main causes of this situation are climate change, fear of natural disasters, and the pressure of mass tourism. In addition to the high temperatures and heavy rains that have reduced rice production, and the stockpiling of this grain in 2024 due to the threat of an earthquake, there has been a significant increase in foreign visitors eager to eat sushi. This is not just a minor detail. Last year, almost 37 million people visited Japan, a record number that is expected to be even higher this year, pushing the country’s capacity to meet the demand for food and services to its limits.

The ideal of abundance, food hyper-availability, and continuous growth clash head-on with reality. This is also happening in Brazil, the world’s leading coffee exporter, where production of the Arabica variety has fallen in recent years, while global demand continues to grow, as does its price. It has happened in Uruguay’s capital, Montevideo, which in 2023 ran out of drinking water despite the country’s extensive network of rivers. And it is also happening in Mexico, whose white corn production has dwindled and is no longer sufficient to meet domestic demand. According to the Agricultural Markets Consulting Group (GCMA), imports of this grain from the United States increased by 168% in the first quarter of 2025. A poignant irony: in the land of the Indigenous corn peoples, the must-have accessory this year is the North American Corn Belt.

The climate and its boomerang effect

Global food production is one of the main causes of climate change, but it also suffers its consequences mercilessly. A boomerang effect. According to the World Nutrition Report, published in 2021, current production systems “generate more than a third (35%) of greenhouse gas emissions” and contribute to global warming, but this same temperature increase triggers violent phenomena that devastate marine ecosystems, dry up farmland, freeze tropical areas, or flood livestock farms.

Just one degree Celsius can mean the difference between food security and famine. The study, “Impacts of climate change on global agriculture accounting for adaptation,” published in June of this year in the journal Nature, calculates that a 1°C increase in average global temperature reduces food production by about 120 kilocalories per person per day. The research highlights that global warming will cause significant losses in staple crops and that the impacts will not be evenly distributed: they will primarily affect the main current producing regions.

Soil degradation is one of the greatest challenges. Without healthy and sufficient harvests, there is no food for people or animals. In the Mediterranean region — where temperatures are rising faster than in the rest of the world and the risk of desertification and soil degradation is well documented — the effects of climate change threaten food security and sovereignty. More heat means more pests, less biodiversity, a greater risk of zoonotic diseases, and less abundant harvests. The medium- and long-term forecasts are grim, and the first consequences are already being felt.

Two identity crises in the Mediterranean

This has recently been witnessed in Spain, the world’s leading producer of olive oil and one of its largest consumers. Although this so-called liquid gold is a staple and defining product of its cuisine, between 2021 and 2023 its price skyrocketed to such an extent that many bottles and jugs in grocery stores and supermarkets bore tamper-evident seals. The price, more than the oil itself, was on everyone’s lips: over €10 ($11.60) per liter. A persistent drought, exacerbated by increasingly long summer heat waves, ruined harvests and reduced production at olive mills. It also limited access to this nutritional gem for a portion of the population. In 2023 alone, domestic consumption of extra virgin olive oil fell by 23.8% compared to the previous year.

The drought’s impact is widespread, reaching across the Mediterranean Sea, where last spring it marred one of Islam’s most important celebrations. For the first time in nearly three decades, Morocco canceled Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice. The country’s severe water crisis, rising prices for products like meat and wheat, declining purchasing power, and a shortage of local livestock to meet the festival’s demand deprived the North African nation of a central part of the event. In June 2025, Morocco celebrated Eid al-Adha, also known locally as the Feast of the Lamb, without lamb to sacrifice.

Drought, salinity, and heat

What can be done in the face of this situation? What is being done, for example, in Europe? José Miguel Mulet, a professor in the department of biotechnology at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, is clear on the path forward: “First, we need to invest more money in agricultural, livestock, and food research, because this sector is fundamental; and second, it is necessary to establish regulatory standards that allow us to work, while also guaranteeing food safety and respect for the environment.”

Mulet, who has been researching plant tolerance to climate change for 30 years, is critical of the EU legal framework, which he considers too restrictive. “If you prohibit the use of pesticides, if you don’t allow the planting of genetically modified crops but permit their import, if you don’t have an approved regulatory framework for CRISPR [a gene-editing technique] while the rest of the world does, then you’re going to lose food sovereignty because you’ll be forced to import what you could produce yourself.”

The challenge ahead is enormous. “The main effects of climate change are increased drought, temperature, and salinity. A lot of research is being done, but the results so far are quite limited,” he acknowledges. The reason? “When a plant faces drought, salinity, or heat, many mechanisms are affected, not just one. Finding the specific key that makes the plant function better under those conditions often depends not on a single gene, but on an entire system, a complex network, and that is much harder to achieve.”

The researcher gives an example: “Among the transgenic plants on the market, there are many that are insect-resistant, many that are herbicide-resistant, and many that have increased nutritional content, because all of that can be achieved with one or two genes. However, there aren’t that many transgenic plants that tolerate drought. There’s a type of corn that came onto the U.S. market 10 years ago, and there’s HB4 wheat, which was developed by an Argentine state-owned company two years ago. Very little else,” Mulet explains, though he’s not pessimistic: “Now we have better tools and more knowledge. If investment increases, many more varieties tolerant to drought, salinity, and heat will probably be released.”

Invest, innovate, scale

The European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) knows a great deal about the importance of investing in applied research. In 2018, it created a specific community to promote food entrepreneurship in Europe: EIT Food. Since its launch, this community has invested €83 million ($96 million) in the southern part of the continent, which includes the countries most affected by climate change: Spain, Italy, Greece, and Portugal. “We are living through a critical moment, and we must be very clear about this. We are facing droughts, heat waves, torrential rains, floods, and other extreme weather events that affect food production and jeopardize food security from a supply perspective,” explains Begoña Pérez Villarreal, managing director of EIT Food in Southern Europe.

However, these major challenges also present an opportunity for innovation. “We face scarcity, the depletion of natural resources, and the loss of biodiversity,” the expert points out. “We need to improve water management, develop new plant varieties that are more resistant to climate stress, and restore agricultural soils, which are severely damaged. Non-GMO biotechnology techniques exist that allow for the genetic improvement of plants and are feasible in Europe, even with our current legislation. There is a lot of agricultural research and innovation, but we need to scale things up because small-scale solutions have a very limited impact.”

For Pérez Villarreal, “that’s the crux of the matter: scalability. These major challenges cannot be tackled by isolated sectors. The work must be collaborative. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about the world’s largest food company; collaboration is needed from producers, distributors, scientists, consumers, and the public administration. That’s why we work with knowledge communities, startups, corporations, research centers, and universities. If all of that aligns, we have hope.” Otherwise, even celebrating will be difficult: Penedès, Catalonia’s largest wine-producing region, has reduced cava production and increased bottle prices due to poor harvests resulting from lack of rain.

A promise of regeneration

Regenerative agriculture is emerging as a leading trend to mitigate the effects of climate change, reverse the depletion of arable soils, and address the looming threat of food scarcity. In this vein, one of the most powerful European projects is LILAS4SOILS, which promotes carbon-based farming practices through living laboratories in the Mediterranean and southern regions of the European Union (EU). This applied research, which will run until December 2028 and places farmers at its core, aims to restore soil health, learn from the process, and replicate the solutions.

The initiative is ambitious because the starting point is very bleak. “The Mediterranean region is essential to the EU’s entire agricultural and food systems. Data shows that it is one of the areas most affected by the effects of climate change. The region is warming 20% faster than the global average and is particularly vulnerable to soil degradation and desertification,” explains Sonia Pietosi, the project manager. “In the future, under a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario, yields of crops such as wheat, maize, and sugar beets are projected to decline in southern Europe by up to 50% by 2050.”

“Healthy soils are the cornerstone of transforming the agri-food system,” Pietosi continues. “Depleted soil cannot produce enough food to sustain the population, let alone a growing one. Of course, this goes hand in hand with many other aspects of the ecosystem, such as water management and biodiversity. Like any large and significant change, soil health and carbon sequestration cannot be achieved through the efforts of just one party. It is a systemic issue, and all components of the agri-food system must contribute to the change,” the expert concludes.

Since its launch last year with 35 farmers and 15 experimental sites, LILAS4SOILS has seen a noticeable increase in interest. “We launched an open call to expand the project and have received over 280 applications. This shows that we are on the right track and that many farmers understand the value of regenerative and carbon-based agriculture for securing the future of their farms,” explains Pietosi.

Science for better distribution

Earth Overshoot Day — the day of the year when the demand for natural resources exceeds the Earth’s capacity to regenerate them — is arriving earlier each year. According to the Global Footprint Network, the international research organization that measures this deficit, it fell on July 24 in 2025. Not all countries contribute to this depletion equally — Qatar tops the list; Uruguay is at the bottom — nor are its consequences distributed equitably. The effects are most severe in the poor countries of the Global South, where hunger and malnutrition are rampant, and farmland is being transformed into camps for climate refugees.

Millions of people are displaced by extreme weather events each year. Abrupt changes in environmental conditions result in human, economic, and social losses. “The rise in food prices may mean that coffee costs a dollar more where I live now, in California, but it is a matter of lives and livelihoods for the families of small coffee farmers in Brazil, Colombia, and West Africa,” Himanshu Gupta, executive director of ClimateAI, explained a couple of years ago at the World Economic Forum.

Today, nearly a third of the world’s population — some 2.6 billion people — cannot afford a healthy diet, the cost of which has risen significantly in the last five years. According to data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the majority of those affected are in Africa. There, the percentages are reversed: only 33.3% of people have access to a healthy diet.

There are no simple, isolated, or magical solutions, neither in specific areas of knowledge nor in any field of action. As José Miguel Mulet reflects, “if you have high production, but distribution is poor and people continue to go hungry, the problem isn’t technology; it’s a social and political problem.” The future doesn’t lie solely in the realm of science.

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