Harvest of Power: Food as the New Frontier in Hybrid Warfare
In an era where strategic competition has resurged as a driving force of international politics, no dimension of statecraft is more important than economics. This idea is rooted in American history with its origins in Hamiltonian thought about the central role of industry in building strong empires. The United States rose to power on the ability of the American Midwest to feed emerging cities on both sides of the Atlantic with inexpensive wheat, enabling the industrial revolution and transforming the global balance of power as American farmers and traders out-competed Russia on production, transportation, and the financial networks that supported both. Today, American policymakers are grappling with a difficult truth: though empires are built on trade and industry, this is also where they’re most vulnerable.
The conditions that underpinned America’s rise to power have changed, largely as a result of its own policy mistakes. The interconnected global economy and diversification of supply chains intended to facilitate the growth of partner states has resulted in two unintended consequences: those “partners” have grown into serious geostrategic rivals, and the divestment of U.S. domestic capacity has left its critical systems – including its food systems – susceptible to weaponization. Too long wedded to the religion of free-trade-above-all, Washington has finally come to realize it spent decades underwriting the rise of its greatest challengers, whose goals (and means) may not be as benign as once hoped. Still reeling from the revelation that letting the foxes into the henhouse didn’t turn them into hens, the United States is now struggling to get all its players and partners on one team.
The economic domain of contemporary conflict has both a defensive (identifying vulnerabilities and risks in critical industries) and an offensive (competing in global markets and translating wealth into power) component. In this context, hybrid warfare, which integrates conventional, irregular, and cyber tactics below the threshold of traditional warfare, is reshaping global conflicts. As nations grapple with evolving threats, food has emerged as a critical and underappreciated weapon in this landscape. The manipulation of food supplies for geopolitical leverage is a hallmark of hybrid warfare, enabling state and non-state actors to destabilize adversaries and advance strategic goals without direct military confrontation.
The United States has too long overlooked this component of grey zone conflict, leaving its critical domestic systems increasingly vulnerable while some of its biggest firms facilitate the transfer of strategic advantages to its geopolitical rivals. The time has come for U.S. industry to synergize its resource capacity and mitigate a serious emerging threat: the weaponization of food by state competitors.
Balancing Efficiency and Resiliency in Domestic Food Systems
The network of vertically integrated, highly consolidated conglomerates that makes up U.S. food systems, though efficient, leaves entire industries overly reliant on single-points-of-failure for critical goods and increasingly open to deliberate attack. The Department of Defense has been sounding this alarm bell over the defense industry for some time. With uncertainty over the future of Taiwan, the U.S. finally turned its attention to examining its defense industrial base for supply chain risks. But the hyperfocus on defense-industry risks, though rightly prioritized, has left broader risks that pose direct threats to security unaddressed. This is nowhere more prevalent than in food supply. In the same way microchips and semiconductors underly an industry that provides security for the United States, the agriculture industry provides human security at the most fundamental level. Agriculture is not the benign good it tends to be regarded as: it is in fact, both strategic and existential. The modern world was built on the ability of a small percentage of the population to feed the rest, and the systems that underpin that world will crumble without it.
U.S. policymakers have long understood that food falls into the category of strategic commodities along with oil, critical minerals, and now semiconductors. Yet abundance, not scarcity, is one of the sacred pillars of the American way of life: the ability to access food from around the world on demand is largely taken for granted. The truth is that the food we eat and the complex, interconnected system that grows, processes, and transports this most essential resource, is vulnerable. Today, U.S. food supply chains in key industries are increasingly brittle and opaque due to the industry-wide tendency toward hyper-consolidation. Though the collective memory is short, it was only a few years ago that a human virus shut down just a handful of domestic beef, pork, and poultry processing plants. Within days, stores began experiencing shortages, leading to rationing. The easy out was to blame consumer panic stocking, but this (perhaps deliberately) obfuscates the harsh reality: contemporary U.S. food systems lack sufficient resiliency to ensure stability. Overstocking was a symptom (albeit a self-exacerbating one), but the root cause was the amalgamation of U.S. food production into too few players and too few facilities. 85% of U.S. beef, 45% of poultry, and 67% of pork is processed by just four companies (colloquially called the ‘Big Four’). This means farmers and ranchers must often sell to, or directly produce for, these conglomerates, but it has the added effect of driving out smaller processing plants and creating chokepoints in the supply chain. When Covid-19 spread rapidly through the massive processing plants full of shoulder-to-shoulder workers, there was nowhere to funnel the instant excess capacity of live animals for processing and distribution. Within weeks, farmers were forced to kill and bury livestock they couldn’t get in to bottlenecked processing facilities.
U.S. producers would be wise to resist putting all its eggs in one basket (or cows in one pen, so to speak) because the food system isn’t just vulnerable to accidental shocks such as Covid-19. Adversaries undoubtedly noticed how quickly the U.S. supply chain for key food items broke down and how few targets are actually needed to trigger serious breakdowns in domestic food systems. The Covid-related supply issues were a result of shutting down just a few production plants. How might a cyber-attack replicate – and amplify – this effect when it can spread through linked company-wide computer systems faster than a human virus?
This near miss should have been a glaring warning sign that the U.S. has a serious risk to domestic stability embedded in its food systems, but instead, recent developments are exacerbating the problem. In the beef industry, sustained droughts have led to a smaller domestic herd, making the Big Four increasingly reliant on foreign suppliers. The immediate response by many U.S. ranchers has been to fill the gap by increasing the number of heifers sent to feed lots destined for beef production. This will mean fewer heifers reproducing on ranches for future years, which will lead to longer term issues in the ability of the domestic beef industry to meet demand. The pork industry is in a state of oversupply, leading Smithfield (which alone accounts for 26% of all U.S. pork production) to end contracts with its pig farmers, while keeping the company owned farms, further consolidating every link in the supply chain and risking the closing of small to mid-sized farms across the United States. This is problematic not just from a resiliency standpoint but from a geostrategic one: Smithfield is the largest U.S. pork producer; it’s vertically integrated; it was purchased by a Chinese investor in 2013, and it actually increased its pork exports to China during the pandemic meat shortages.
Risks Lurking Beneath the Surface
But these aren’t the only agricultural industries susceptible to disruptions, and these are its problems before you even start examining related supply chains of key inputs for agricultural production. Unpacking that supply chain from top to bottom reveals this is only the tip of the iceberg. If there is one single point of failure that could unravel the global food system, it is nitrogen-based fertilizer production. This is problematic because the world’s leading exporters of nitrogen-based fertilizer, the invention that allows the planet to sustain a human population of eight billion, are Russia (13%), China (12%), and Belarus (5%), with the U.S. a leading destination for its fertilizer exports. Fertilizer is to food production what microchips are to consumer and military electronic systems. But unlike manufactured goods, food production cannot withstand delays while supply chains readjust. When farmers miss narrow planting windows, a delay of days may mean decreased yields; weeks can lead to significant shortages; a month risks total crop failure should farmers still decide to plant at all. In the same way overreliance for microelectronics leaves the entire U.S. defense industry open to risk, weaponizable interdependence in the inputs that form the basis of modern food production leaves its population vulnerable to geopolitics-driven food insecurity.
Russia’s position as the world’s largest exporter of natural gas amplifies this problem. Aside from making up approximately 70-80% of the energy used to produce it, natural gas is also a physical component of nitrogen-based fertilizers destined for farm use. Natural gas is to fertilizer what critical minerals are to microelectronics. This has ripple effects throughout food systems: it doesn’t just undergird the production of commodities for direct human consumption, but also further upstream: hay grown for dairies and beef cattle, wheat, maize, and soy for animal feed, cotton for clothing and cooking oils. The U.S. may be the world’s largest producer of natural gas, but turning that into food is a story about supply chains and policy decisions, not natural resources. Despite its significant natural gas reserves and production capacity, the U.S. is the world’s 3rd largest importer of fertilizers, importing 1.95 billion dollars of fertilizer from Russia in 2022 (the last year data was available at the time of this article).
In 2022, Europe also imported roughly 45 percent of its natural gas from Russia. The disruption to gas supply after the destruction of the Nordstream pipeline that same year caused a 70 percent drop in European production of ammonia for fertilizers and led rapidly to global fertilizer shortages. U.S. farmers, unable to predict prices from one day to the next, and worried about obtaining enough fertilizer for that year’s planting, ordered fertilizer by truckloads when they could get it at all. In Arizona, delays in obtaining fertilizer during spring 2022’s planting season resulted in upwards of 30 percent declines in yields for some farmers. Were shortages sustained just a little longer, this would have had more serious impacts on food prices and availability, but for the fact that fertilizers were exempted from U.S. sanctions on Russia: a necessary but short-term solution that tells Moscow exactly where its strongest geopolitical levers are located.
The Geoeconomics of Strategic Commodities
While the vulnerabilities in domestic food systems continue to build, geopolitical rivals are reaping the benefits of U.S. decline in production of the world’s most important foods. The U.S. share of the global wheat market has plummeted from 25% in 2010 to 9% projected for 2024. Several dynamics undergird this decline. Wheat lags behind corn and soybeans in technological developments and recent price volatility driven primarily by geopolitics have made wheat a risky bet for U.S. farmers. The drastic decline is at least partly a result of strategic calculation by Russia. Boosted by structural improvements in the agriculture sector and investment in processing and storage facilities, Russia rapidly increased its production capacity in the early 2000s. In response to western sanctions after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Putin instituted widespread bans on western food imports and devalued the ruble, making Russian exports cheaper. By 2017, Russia had surpassed the United States to become the world’s largest wheat exporter.
This is no small problem: Declining U.S. wheat exports leaves partners, allies, and everyone in between increasingly exposed to geopolitical pressure tied to reliance on Russian wheat. There is no substitute for the role wheat plays in the human diet at every level of the socioeconomic ladder. Wheat, otherwise called the “famine food,” makes up a disproportionate part of the diet in poorer countries. It also has a compelling history of making and breaking empires. Russia provided the bulk of European grain imports until the United States replaced Russia as the breadbasket of Europe in the mid-1800s as methods of long-term grain storage enabled long-distance transit. Viewed through the lens of Putin’s desire to restore the former Russian Empire, the invasion of Ukraine and the outsized role agriculture has played in that conflict makes sense. The wealth and power of the Russian Empire was built on Catherine the Great’s conquest of present-day Ukraine, and the grain exports flowing from the new port of Odessa. For this reason, Scott Reynolds Nelson speculated in February 2022 that Russia would never again be a great power without control of Ukraine. Putin launched the full-scale invasion two days later. This is not to suggest the relationship between the two events was causal, only that they share an understanding of the significance of this most important of commodities. It’s no accident that Russia’s most recent attempts to acquire Ukraine occurred shortly after Ukraine had re-established itself as a globally important source of grain exports.
In the era of hybrid warfare, Russia is a formidable player with a long history of weaponizing food. The Holodomore, which literally means to ‘inflict death by starvation’ is widely understood to have been a famine orchestrated in Moscow, which caused the deaths of nearly four million Ukrainians in the early 1930s. A study of the Holodomore by Northwestern University concluded that the central government in Moscow did in fact take more grain per person from Ukrainians than Russians, accounting for up to 92 percent of the famine deaths in Ukraine.
The immediate targeting of Ukrainian wheat commencing with the 2022 invasion suggests wheat once again has everything to do with Russia’s end game. The blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports during the invasion prevented it from exporting to destinations in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. This led almost immediately to global grain shortages, driving up the price and benefitting Russia financially as the world scrambled to replace its wheat imports. As Russia came under pressure for the humanitarian impact on the most vulnerable parts of the world, Putin made a half-hearted attempt to alter the narrative, claiming a record harvest in Russia that could fill the gap and signing onto the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which temporarily allowed Ukrainian grain to flow until Russia pulled out of the deal in 2023. Meanwhile, the Russian army was stealing harvests, occupying storage facilities, and moving Ukrainian grain into Russian-occupied Crimea, where it could export it out of Russian-controlled ports. Global supply issues have since improved, in no small part because much of the grain leaving the Black Sea was plundered and exported as Russian grain, which prompts the question of where Russia’s claimed “record harvests” in 2022 and 2023, really came from.
The prospect of a Russian victory in Ukraine is intensely problematic from a global food security perspective. By 2021, Ukraine and Russia together accounted for over one third of the world’s entire wheat supply. If Russia succeeds at controlling this from harvest to port, Moscow gains greater leverage to use this critical food source as a geopolitical weapon it won’t hesitate to use. Putin’s propensity to weaponize critical goods, including food, has not been limited to Ukraine. Before the Nordstream pipeline was damaged, Russia had already cut off European gas supplies in an attempt to coerce leadership into paying in Rubles in order to bypass U.S. sanctions. At the same time, Russia threatened to limit access to its agricultural products, specifically naming Europe and North America as its targets.
Even barring a Russian victory, the war has left Ukraine with damaged infrastructure at storage and export facilities, burnt wheat fields, and the possibility of a negotiated settlement that leaves Russia with territorial control of prime farmland. As refugees are forced to flee and remaining farmers put out of business by Russia’s heavy-handed tactics, Ukraine is unlikely to come out of the 2020s with the market share it had pre-invasion. The question is whether Russia will be permitted the spoils as U.S. production continues its decline. This is a critical question for U.S. partners around the globe, since Russia has habitually withheld or released wheat exports for domestic political or geopolitical reasons.
At first glance, this seems like a solvable problem for the United States. U.S. firms have significant assets in the grain trade: the ABCD commodity traders, all U.S.-owned, control approximately three quarters of the global trade in grain. But the byproduct of a hyper-globalized economic system is a tangled web of wickedly problematic relationships. As actual food production has shifted eastward to Russia, Ukraine, and parts of Eastern Europe, U.S. firms increasingly invest in downstream activities (mainly, storage and shipping). Cargill’s purchase of a 25% stake in the grain terminals of the Russian port of Novorossiysk in 2013 left it in an uncomfortable position in the wake of Russia’s plundering of Ukrainian harvests. Though it eventually sold its stake in the grain terminal in 2023, Cargill is still shipping Russian grain out of the port, less than 200 kilometers from the border of Crimea. Although western sanctions have placed limitations on activity out of several Crimean ports known for shipping stolen grain, these sanctioned port cities deliver to Russian ports through the Sea of Azov, and the internal grain storage sites are connected by road and rail directly into Russia, where it can be mixed and shipped out of non-sanctioned Russian ports.
Such entanglements, combined with critical resource dependencies, create crises of national power. Europe should have learned this in 2014 when Moscow threatened to cut Germany’s natural gas supplies in the middle of winter should Berlin oppose Russian aggression in Crimea. The U.S. should have learned this when disruptions to Russian natural gas exports in 2022 immediately impacted the cost and availability of fertilizer for U.S. farmers. Instead, both sides of the Atlantic band-aid the problem by shifting Russian gas from delivery by pipeline to delivery by sea and exempting Russian fertilizer from sanctions.
Mitigating Risk in a Complex System
The inherent complexities of contemporary food systems present a staggering list of potential points of risk and vulnerability. Though only a handful are examined in-depth here, food systems are also open to risk emanating from a number of related areas. All of these are necessary, but not sufficient to support the food supply, and all are susceptible to disruption from both adversaries and natural sources. Transportation systems, water supply, soil health, climate change, biological and chemical threats to plants and animals (both natural and manufactured), and geopolitical threats to the food, water, energy nexus generate compounding security risks with potentially systemic effects.
Diversifying toward alternate energy sources can help build resiliency into energy markets, but until there is another scientific breakthrough, it can’t replace nitrogen-based fertilizers. There is promise in innovative and (more importantly) scalable regenerative farming methods based on a newly patented composting process pioneered in the Phoenix east valley and designed for farming in arid climates. Such methods offset synthetic nitrogen requirements, sequester carbon, and improve soil structure and water retention, making food systems more resilient against climate-related disruptions as well as less reliant on petrochemically derived fertilizers. The biggest battle it faces is surviving Maricopa county’s relentless efforts to stymie such breakthroughs through new composting regulations that target the wrong problem, the wrong process, and the wrong industry. The U.S.’s worst enemy here, it seems, is once again itself: it self-generates new problems by failing to understand the impact on the system as a whole.
This can be fixed. The resilience of food systems needs to be reconceptualized as a national security problem in the context of grey zone conflict. Public and private sector investment in domestic capacity for critical food-related goods should be a priority, including research and development in drought and disease-resistant seeds. The lack of a coherent trade policy for agriculture needs addressing, with a focus on opening export markets for American goods and reducing foreign tariffs on American wheat. Attention to emerging markets with growing populations should be at the center of the conversation. Most of the growth in food demand in the future is likely to come from Africa, where Russian meddling and Chinese investment are crowding out opportunities for a U.S. foothold. This neglect has already created the space for U.S. rivals to lock down control of resources in energy and rare earth minerals, for which the U.S. and its European allies have paid dearly.
The resilience of food systems needs to be reconceptualized as a national security problem in the context of grey zone conflict. Public and private sector investment in domestic capacity for critical food-related goods should be a priority, including research and development in drought and disease-resistant seeds.
In wheat, there may be a critical window of opportunity as the world increasingly prizes reliability in its trade partners. Support for Foreign Market Development and Market Access Programs can help educate potential partners on the benefits of buying U.S. wheat while emphasizing its relative reliability. The U.S. cannot by law institute export bans except in the case of a declared national emergency. Against Putin’s record of wheat export bans and the supply uncertainties it creates, this is an appealing prospect. Likewise, the U.S. should support increased capacity of allies and partners for critical goods. Coordination with reliable partners will strengthen safety nets and improve the collective capacity to marginalize an adversary’s ability to manipulate markets and use life-sustaining goods as geopolitical levers.
As a linchpin of both food and energy systems, the U.S. must also turn its attention to natural gas. Although Russia is the world’s largest exporter of grain, natural gas, and fertilizer, the world’s largest producer of the last two is still the United States. That’s a failure of geoeconomic strategy. Europe needs to replace its natural gas source. Though imports of Russian gas to the EU by pipeline have declined sharply since 2022 (which is in itself a tremendous accomplishment), imports of Russian Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG), which are exempt from EU sanctions, spiked in 2023, up nearly 40 percent in the first six months of the year. If the EU has any hope of eliminating its energy dependence on Russia, the U.S. must step up its investment in LNG conversion and export facilities. In the short term, investment in natural gas production is necessary to keep the alliance supporting Ukraine together. In the longer term, it simultaneously addresses energy security, food security, geopolitical, and climate change goals.
There is a critical window of opportunity over the next several years as LNG markets are developing into global networks. China is betting on it, investing in gas pipelines connecting it to Siberia, which offers a more secure supply route than sea corridors in case of a military confrontation. China is also attempting to develop a regional LNG trade hub, including investing in regasification facilities in Europe. This is aimed at more than Chinese energy security; it is also a strategic geopolitical move. Unlike petroleum, natural gas markets are not closely tied to the U.S. dollar, making it an energy source much less vulnerable to western sanctions. Russia also bet big on it, investing in LNG production and export infrastructure in the Russian Arctic, backed by European partners who provided the capital and technological expertise. The loss of European support is a major setback to Russia’s ambitions in future energy markets, creating an opening for the U.S. and allies. As LNG markets become increasingly global (and increasingly critical for energy security), major trading hubs will control key nodes in tomorrow’s energy markets. With the world increasingly wary of dependence on unreliable partners for critical goods and the EU re-classifying natural gas a clean energy in 2022, there has never been a more opportune moment for the U.S., with its vast reserves of natural gas, to secure its economic and geopolitical future.
Conclusion: Strategic Responses to the Weaponization of Food in Hybrid Warfare
The United States has a significant food systems problem with grave implications for national security, geopolitics, and ultimately, global food security. Decades of over-consolidation at critical points in the production chain, the obsessive quest for efficiency, and a global race to the bottom for critical inputs without regard for geopolitical risks has left behind a mess of strategic vulnerabilities. These are vulnerabilities that adversaries can easily capitalize on. The fallout from Russia’s conquest of Ukraine went deeper than the headlines on wheat; Russia’s role in upstream products for food production means the world must now contend with multilayered risks to food security. Nordstream’s destruction may have flown under the radar of the average consumer, but farmers all over the world understood the impact and its potential to be much worse. The future of hybrid warfare is this type of event: questionable attribution, compounding geopolitical effects, below the threshold of conventional war, but with real consequences for human security.
Food systems can be weaponized in a way that erodes American geopolitical power and undermines domestic stability. Rather than recognizing the power of this kind of warfare, the United States continues to underwrite the transfer of its strategic advantages to its adversaries as Russia’s increasing market share of the global wheat supply is facilitated by the very U.S. producers Putin has displaced. Perhaps the West can continue to look the other way while Russia finances its occupation by stealing grain in occupied Ukraine and exporting it out of Crimean & Russian ports. Doing something about it would seriously disrupt the global trade in wheat and put the most food-insecure areas at immediate risk. On the other hand, perhaps U.S. firms shipping grain for Russia isn’t in the world’s long-term security interests any more than it is the United States’ long-term strategic interests.
Last time the U.S. faced destabilizing conflict in Europe that threatened the peace and security of the world, Roosevelt’s calls to the titans of industry to stop financing the disrupters and supply the arsenal of democracy went largely ignored until Pearl Harbor. Let us hope it doesn’t take such a catastrophic event to call them home this time, because now the world has bigger weapons and more vulnerable systems. Before the next destabilizing event leaves the world with famine-inducing fallout, leaders should think strategically about how to build flexible, resilient systems that can withstand, and adapt to, the unexpected. This is nowhere more important than in the food supply – the basis of prosperity, stability, and modernity. We might also consider the possibility that in the era of grey zone conflict, the balance of power might be determined not solely by the biggest bombs or the adoption of emerging technologies, but at least equally by the production and distribution of the world’s food.
