Twenty years ago, the world was in the throes of rising oil prices. As the cost of fuel climbed, so, too, did the cost of food production and distribution. This set the stage for a global food price crisis that upended the lives of hundreds of millions of people.1Today, in 2026, a similar scenario is unfolding. The Israeli-US war on Iran has triggered a massive spike in fossil fuel prices. Because this is playing out in the Persian Gulf, fuel shipments from one of the biggest sources of oil and gas on the planet have stopped altogether. Both fuel and fertilisers used for food production are deeply affected. Farmers from India to Brazil are being forced to plant less or cut back on fertiliser use, raising fears about the consequences later this year. But already, food prices are shooting up in many countries due to the increased costs of transportation, cooking and packaging. In Tanzania, for instance, prices in April were up 20% for cooking oil, 17% for potatoes, 50% for green banana, 20% for bread and 18% for onions.2 The worst will come months from now, when today’s cuts in planting or fertiliser use will show up as reduced harvests. The situation will be particularly bad for crops like rice, maize and wheat that have been bred to rely heavily on chemical fertilisers through decades of green revolution-style plant breeding programmes.There are even more parallels between today's food crisis and the one of two decades ago. With the previous one, the impacts of high fuel prices were greatly amplified by extreme weather events, especially floods and droughts. Today, the world is bracing for a “Godzilla” El Niño to cause severe droughts and flooding later this year and into the next. Back in 2008, financial speculators and corporations dominating the seeds, fertiliser, commodity trading and supermarket sectors used their power to extract mega profits and passed the costs on to farmers and consumers.3 Today, corporate concentration and financialisation in the food system have grown more extreme.4 In France, for instance, the major supermarket chains are accused by Parliament of pocketing 40 cents from every euro spent on food, as well as other predatory practices.5 In this context, governments from the UK to Ecuador are looking at ways to cap or control essential food prices.Production of biofuels from food crops is surging again too, as an alternative to high priced and difficult to access oil. Biofuels were an important factor in the food crisis twenty years ago, and the rise in production today is already contributing to an increase in prices for crops like maize and oil palm that are used in biofuels.6Fundamental shiftsBut there are also some very important differences between these two moments.The first is that the situation today is the direct result of war and imperialist aggression: the US-Israeli attack on Iran, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. In both cases, the decisions of just a few white men are inflicting pain and suffering not just in the targeted countries but on communities around the world.More harm is bound to come. The international order of the late 20th century, even if it was built on an architecture of neoliberalism, the mantra of economic growth and empty international institutions – all of them designed to facilitate corporate profit – did bring an amount of stability. As a result, people could move around and middle classes grew. That order has been cast into the dustbin, and we have moved deep into a time of raw rivalry over resources and naked bullying, where armed violence is the main tool of power. Ordinary people are more and more constricted in their movement, and the middle class is being gutted.This is having a huge and defining influence over the global food system.7 War and thuggery being waged by today’s authoritarian regimes are driving hunger. Current hotspots include Palestine, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Lebanon, Haiti, Mali, Yemen, Myanmar and Cuba, where sanctions, blockades and other forms of depravation are in force. War is intensifying ecological break-down, putting further pressure on global food production, and, in turn, generating more violent conflict. More than just a casualty of war, food is being used as a weapon of war – withheld or destroyed to collectively punish people and make it easier to seize their lands, waterways or fishing grounds.8In reaction, states are talking more and more about food security, or even food sovereignty. What they mean is the ability to feed their populations and prevent riots that might threaten their power. This can mean, in the case of the Gulf states, building overseas supply chains – controlled by their corporations from farm to supermarket– that guarantee sufficient supplies in times of war or crisis. It can also mean, as in the case of Egypt and Indonesia, using the military to clear communities off their lands and build massive farm projects with private companies to produce staple crops like, wheat, rice and sugar.9 In May this year, the EU announced plans to start stockpiling fertiliser, while Morocco said it would build a massive grains reserve that can hold six months worth of supplies. Such state initiatives are multiplying.Another key difference today compared to twenty years ago is that the world has grown unquestionably more unequal.10 Costs of living-- for things like food, housing, transportation, electricity, clothing, medicines-- are going up, but people's real incomes are not. The rich are getting vastly richer, especially as they accumulate wealth from financial markets and the technology sector. Life for working people, especially those who produce, process and deliver our food, is getting harder. Real wages are declining, jobs are more precarious, climate change and intensification are making farm work and food processing more dangerous, and for many there are no social protections or benefits. This means that people in most parts of the world are more vulnerable to food price spikes than they were 20 years ago. In India, for example, low-wage factory workers are quitting their jobs and going back to their families in the countryside because they cannot afford the increased price of cooking fuel.11The corporations that dominate the various points of the supply chains for food production and distribution are navigating this changing context and holding onto power. They made a windfall in profits during the 2022 price spike and supply shock when Russia invaded Ukraine, and there are no laws and regulations to prevent them from doing so again.12 As Raj Patel noted, oligopoly – where a few companies dominate a given market – is itself a choke point.13 When one out of every four dollars spent on food in the US goes to Walmart, the power is tremendous.14But it won't be so easy for corporations to simply hike up their margins this time round, given the affordability issues people are already facing around the world. They may look instead to cut back on costs, i.e. cheaper ingredients, layoffs and wage cuts. Thus shifting the burden onto food producers, workers and people's health.Geopolitics penetrate foodThe industrial food system, which dominates a part of our food supplies, is intrinsically tied up in geopolitics. Some of the giant commodity traders, like COFCO of China or SALIC of Saudi Arabia, are explicitly bound to the political agendas of their mother countries. Part of the UAE's current “food security” strategy was to buy up a major part of Louis Dreyfus, one of the big five agricultural commodity traders, on condition that the company prioritise shipments to the UAE in times of need.15 When push comes to shove, the US, European and Japanese food companies all line up behind their governments, too. The global food system that corporations manage and control – through regulations tailored to their needs and free trade and investment agreements – is more of a sourcing regime for the wealthy of the world. With wars and climate change making shortages in key, global food commodities and agricultural inputs (like fertilisers) far more likely, this is a deadly scenario for most people on the planet.The concentration of farmland has grown far worse over the past two decades. The food crisis and financial crisis of 2008 triggered a rush to acquire farmland, in which corporations and financial investors grabbed over 30 million hectares within ten years.16 Today, 1% of the world’s largest farms control 70% of the world’s farmland.17 Farmland is now a financial asset, with decisions over how it is used increasingly determined by distant financial actors, completely disconnected from the needs of local communities. Other parts of the food system, most notably trading, have also become more financialised, which makes food production and distribution highly vulnerable to whatever happens in financial markets.18Bold ideas, big coalitionsFood prices are not simply going to go down when ships start sailing through the Strait of Hormuz again. Costs and consequences have already been “baked in” to markets and forecasts. We are in a time of imperial power grabs, connected to climate crisis and surging inequality. That means that while the severity and geography may vary, without deep transformation, food crises are bound to become a permanent condition.Such a deep transformation requires big coalitions based on common agendas.19The most fundamental and urgent actions needed are those to end wars and imperial aggressions, while fighting back against domestic racism and the rise of reactionary and far-right agendas. How? There is no magic bullet. We need to work together to help build larger alliances and greater capacities. This means not only joining solidarity actions, but finding ways to connect to people's every day lives and change the things that are driving them into the hands of the far-right.In terms of government action, people can demand measures to stop corporate profiteering, like price controls, strategic food reserves and wealth taxes on billionaires (and soon to be trillionaires) to redistribute resources and fund public services.20 These are mushrooming in many jurisdictions, and need broad-based political support.We also need to strengthen programmes to ensure equal access to healthy and safe food. Good examples of this are what Mayor Zohran Mamdani is doing in New York City to create public groceries, as well as the food social security systems being tested in numerous countries of Europe.21 But these cannot be top-down, big state projects, of the kind that President Prabowo is implementing in Indonesia.22 They should be led by the food producers and workers who are already there. We need to build public investment, without corporations.The US-Israel war on Iran has, once again, made our food system's over-reliance on fossil fuels and vulnerability to imperial aggressions painfully obvious. When taken together with the climate crisis, it is clear that we must urgently break this addiction and build up biodiverse food systems that are far less dependent on fossil fuels.23 This can be a core objective bringing different social movements together, but only if it is anchored in building economies of solidarity and equity.The irony of how Iran feeds the UAESoon after the war on Iran started, Teheran retaliated by sending a barrage of missiles and drones against US interests in the United Arab Emirates, just across the Persian Gulf. People in the UAE understandably panicked. But perhaps lost from view was the extent to which they had grown to rely on Iranian farmers for their daily food. As reported by The Economist a year earlier, a huge web of “smuggling” (in the eyes of the US sanctions’ regime) had developed to ship Iranian cucumbers, aubergines, mushrooms, lettuce, tomatoes, celery and more to the UAE.24 They were buried in boxes and hidden in ships that regularly plied the two-hour journey via Sharjah. Once on the UAE side, they continued their journey into the Emirates’ cities and supermarkets through a system of payments where currencies never changed hands but goods like appliances were bartered in exchange and sent back to Iran. This market boomed as elites who run the Gulf states’ food system logistics looked the other way, The Economist notes. Before the attacks started, 36,000 small farmers in Iran were supplying nine out of ten cauliflowers, tomatoes and watermelons imported by the UAE! More ironic still: some of these farmers have been using irrigation equipment imported from Israel via Europe.Photo: maize destroyed by drought. iStock1 GRAIN, “Seized: The 2008 landgrab for food and financial security”, October 2008, https://grain.org/e/932 World Food Programme, “Middle East crisis: Risks and impacts for food security in Tanzania”, May 2026, https://reliefweb.int/report/united-republic-tanzania/middle-east-crisis-risks-and-impacts-food-security-tanzania-may-20263 GRAIN, “Making a killing from hunger”, April 2008, https://grain.org/e/1784 Financial speculators have already started to position themselves to profit from rising food prices. See: Ties Gijzel, Remy Koens, Jan Daalder, "Since beginning of Iran war, traders have ramped up bets on rising food prices", Follow the Money, May 2026, https://www.ftm.eu/articles/iran-war-traders-bet-billions-on-rising-food-prices5 Public Senat, “« Menaces », « relations commerciales brutales » : la commission d’enquête du Sénat sur les marges étrille la grande distribution dans son rapport”, May 2026, https://www.publicsenat.fr/actualites/parlementaire/menaces-relations-commerciales-brutales-la-commission-denquete-du-senat-sur-les-marges-etrille-la-grande-distribution-dans-son-rapport6 This is stated by Anna Manz, Chief Financial Officer, Nestlé S.A., in a 1st quarter call with investors: https://www.nestle.com/media/mediaeventscalendar/allevents/2026-three-month-sales7 African Centre for Biodiversity, “Critical minerals, fertilisers, agrochemicals, digital power, and the erosion of food sovereignty”, April 2026, https://acbio.org.za/corporate-expansion/critical-minerals-fertilisers-agrochemicals-digital-power-and-the-erosion-of-food-sovereignty/8 See, for example, Ashraf Wani, “Ground report: Boats idle, no income as war hits Lebanese fishermen hard”, India Today, 26 March 2026, https://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/ground-report-south-lebanon-tyre-fishermen-financial-harship-israeli-strikes-curbs-2887232-2026-03-26 or La Via Campesina, “Globalization of war and the starvation of people”, 17 April 2026, https://viacampesina.org/en/2026/04/food-sovereignty-in-the-face-of-war-imperialism-and-the-hunger-of-peoples-around-the-world/9 “The bogus food estate project”, Tempo, January 2026, https://farmlandgrab.org/33267; “Egypt's President opens New Delta project to grow wheat in desert with ‘artificial river’”, The National, May 2026, https://www.thenationalnews.com/news/mena/2026/05/17/egypts-president-opens-new-delta-project-to-grow-wheat-in-desert-with-artificial-river/10 See, for instance, https://realtimeinequality.org/11 “India’s workers quit city life over impact of Iran war on gas prices”, Financial Times, May 2026: https://www.ft.com/content/06830b71-0142-4da0-adb6-454be8b7fa7c12 GRAIN, “Food inflation: The math doesn't add up without factoring in corporate power”, March 2024, https://grain.org/e/712013 Raj Patel, “The strait we're in”, March 2026: https://newsletter.rajpatel.org/p/the-strait-were-in14 Claire Kelloway, “Walmart’s super-sized impact on the food system", Civil Eats, July 2019, https://civileats.com/2019/07/12/walmarts-super-sized-impact-on-the-food-system/15 GRAIN, “From land to logistics: UAE's growing power in the global food system”, July 2024, https://grain.org/e/717016 GRAIN, “The global farmland grab in 2016: how big, how bad?”, June 2016, https://grain.org/e/549217 IPES-Food, “Land Squeeze”, May 2024, https://ipes-food.org/report-summary/land-squeeze/18 See the interview with UNCTAD's Anastasia Nesvetailova by Follow the Money, March 2026: https://www.ftm.eu/articles/next-food-crisis-devastating-un-expert19 Along these lines, see the IUF's "Resolution 1: The deepening global food crisis'. 6-7 May 2026, https://www.iuf.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20200513-LINK-EC-resolution-on-food-crisis-e.pdf20 IPES, "The New Geopolitics of Food", May 2026, https://ipes-food.org/report/the-new-geopolitics-of-food/21 “What is going on in the grocery industry?”, Jacobin, October 2025: https://jacobin.com/2025/10/grocery-industry-walmart-mamdani-schweizer22 Nurul Aini, “Indonesia's free meals programme for children and the rise of ‘food oligarchies’”, April 2026: https://grain.org/e/736923 GRAIN, “Amid the fertiliser crisis, Africa has a chemical-free option: agroecology”, May 2026: https://grain.org/e/738224 The Economist, “Uncovering the secret food trade that corrupts Iran’s neighbours”, 31 July 2025, https://www.economist.com/interactive/finance-and-economics/2025/07/31/irans-forbidden-fruit