Miller Magazine Issue: 149 May 2022

91 INTERVIEW MILLER / MAY 2022 modity prices by restricting food exports or making hoard pur- chases on global markets. This was a factor in driving already high prices higher during the last food price crisis, and a number of countries are engaging in this behavior since the invasion. A second issue to watch in the immediate term is whether coun- tries like the United States increase foreign food aid to food-in- secure regions most impacted by rising commodity prices. Even apart from humanitarian concerns, this aid is needed to minimize the risk of political unrest that we know is associated with food insecurity, including during the last food price crisis. In the intermediate term, we will hear growing calls this year to increase agricultural production to make up for the loss of Black Sea exports. In the United States, that conversation is focused on 23 million acres that currently are enrolled in a program cre- ated in the 1980s called the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to enter long-term contracts to idle land and implement conservation measures. The USDA is under pressure to allow farmers to remove this land from the program without penalty and bring it back into production. This is a bad idea. CRP acreage is environmentally sensitive land with more marginal productive capacity. In many cases it is not feasible to bring the land back into production quickly, if at all, and the environmen- tal costs are significant. In any event, we have enough food to feed the world. Millions are threatened with an increasing risk of food insecurity because they can’t access food without relying on imports from a small number of wealthier nations. We need a solution that addresses that problem, not a “let me try to help you without putting down my cheap bacon cheeseburger and super-sized sweetened soda” approach to global food security. That is the long-term issue that the war in Ukraine requires us to confront. In the wake of the last food price crisis, the United States launched an initiative called Feed the Future, an all-of-government approach to nonemergency foreign aid that focuses on addressing the root causes of food insecurity through public-private partnerships and investments in agricul- tural production in some of the world’s poorest countries. It was an acknowledgement that increased dependency on food im- ports in the decades leading up to the crisis made net-importing countries more vulnerable to price shocks in commodity mar- kets, and that this was a threat to world security. We need more of this type of commitment. But we also need to examine how subsidies and supply-driven, export-focused farm and trade pol- icies helped create a system that leaves so many people across the world in a position of food dependency. The war in Ukraine did not create that vulnerability. We designed it. We built it right into the industrial food system. * This interview was first published on the University of Virginia School of Law website and is reprinted with permission.