Changes In The Earth’s Climate Are Making Food Production More Costly

In a study published in Environmental Letters on July 21, 2025, researchers reported that extreme weather has driven up food prices around the world in recent years. There are few things more vital to human life than food, which means if it becomes too expensive, inflation will result. The current administration in the United States swept to power largely as a result of the inflation that followed the Covid 19 pandemic, so it is safe to say higher prices have significant political ramifications.

“We can see that there’s a broad global context for this happening in recent years that extends all the way from East Asia through Europe and also to North America,” Maximillian Kotz, a post-doctoral fellow at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and the lead author of the study, told Inside Climate News. “We think our paper is really a call to action for us to consider these wider effects of food price increases in response to climate change for our societies.”

The researchers pointed out that  extreme heat and dry soil conditions in the summer of 2022 drove an 80% increase in the price of vegetables grown in Arizona and California later that year. In Spain and Italy, a drought in 2022 and 2023 resulted in a 50% increase in olive oil prices by 2024. Similar extreme weather also led to a tripling of prices of cocoa from the Ivory Coast and Ghana and a doubling of some coffee prices last year.

Kotz explained that the research builds on a previous study, done in connection with the European Central Bank and published in 2024, that analyzed how overall consumer prices responded to climatic conditions. “What we found is very strong evidence that abnormally high temperatures drive increases in the price of food and overall inflation and therefore, under future climate change with heat intensifying, we’re going to be expecting to see more and more of these kinds of increases in consumer price indexes, broadly.”

The researchers wrote, “We bring together reports by national and international media of food prices spiking in response to climate extremes across a range of countries to build a global picture. These reports typically rely on interviews with local producers, consumers and industry specialists in order to link price increases to recent weather conditions. As such, they provide a valuable narrative approach leveraging local knowledge to connect price changes with weather, which complements recent statistical analyses relying on a detailed causal modelling framework.”

Food Prices Have Consequences

The researchers say climate related spikes in food prices could lead to a cascading series of social consequences — nutritional, economic, and political. As central banks, including the Federal Reserve, try to control inflation, food prices could “challenge their ability to fulfill their targets for monetary stability,” Kotz said.

Raj Patel, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, told Inside Climate News that climate change will lead to further price spikes. When that happens, “dire social consequences are going to emerge.” For example, wildfires in Russia in 2010 forced the price of wheat to skyrocket. Higher wheat prices contributed to the Arab Spring anti-government protests and violence that took place across much of the Arab world.

Patel noted that Russia was undergoing austerity measures when the wildfires were sweeping across its wheat belt, meaning there was less money available to fight the fires. The country then imposed an embargo on wheat exports, sending the global price of wheat soaring.

“In Mozambique, for instance … we saw bread riots and we saw people taking to the streets because the price of wheat had risen so high that they couldn’t afford daily bread,” Patel explained in a call with reporters. “But Mozambique itself had undergone austerity, and there wasn’t any money for policing to buy rubber bullets, so the police opened fire with live ammunition. That is how a heat spike in Russia can cause deaths by live ammunition in Mozambique.”

Increases in food prices have obvious impacts on overall food consumption, but can also shift the choices people make. Research by the Food Foundation in London found that food-insecure households in the UK reduce their consumption of fruits and vegetables when prices go up.

That’s a “really big pattern by socioeconomic status, this really strong gradient where the lowest-income households eat the least and the highest-income households eat the most,” said Anna Taylor, the executive director of the foundation and a co-author of the new paper. “That really, really matters for health because fruits and vegetables … are massively important for immunity, but also long term protections from a whole range of chronic conditions.”

Food & Politics

Nothing illustrates the close connection between food and politics better than the announcement this week by the USDA that it is terminating any and all programs designed to help Black farmers, women, and veterans. The failed US administration, faithfully following the hate filled strictures of Project 2025, is determined to root out any and all provisions in federal law and regulations that confer an advantage on people of color, women, and military veterans.

Such policies discriminate against white males, they claim, and since discrimination is prohibited by the Constitution, the government is duty bound not to do anything that might be construed as preferring some citizens over others. “The Civil War and Jim Crow laws are so yesterday,” seems to be the official attitude. “Get over it and move on!”

On July 17, 2025, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, a MAGA apparatchik whose previous work experience includes being an ethics adviser to Texas governor Rick Perry and who knows frack all about agriculture, made this bold statement. “We are taking this aggressive, unprecedented action to eliminate discrimination in any form at USDA. It is simply wrong and contrary to the fundamental principle that all persons should be treated equally.” And if they were treated unequally previously, well, that is just hard cheese. They should suck it up and stop whining.

Since the failed US president took office in January, the USDA has cancelled 145 grants worth $148.6 million that were promised to Black farmers in America, according to Black Enterprise.

Mike Lavender, policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, said “Unfortunately, what we’ve seen from the first six months or so from this administration is the injection, consistently, of uncertainty for farmers by freezing contracts that farmers lawfully held, by terminating contracts, by terminating projects unexpectedly, by canceling market opportunities for farmers.”  The result will be higher prices for consumers and more debt for struggling farmers, he said.

A Resegregation Agenda

Congresswoman Shontel Brown of Ohio is a member of the House committee on agriculture. In a statement reported by The Guardian, she said the policy is part of “Trump’s resegregation agenda.” Brown said the rule isn’t about fairness, but stripping the tools to help level the playing field.

“It’s no secret that the department has a long history of locking out and leaving behind Black, brown, and Indigenous farmers. Now, this administration is taking a deliberate and disgraceful step backward on the path to attempt to right the historic wrongs. The ‘socially disadvantaged’ designation was a long overdue recognition of the barriers to land, credit and opportunity that farmers of color have faced for generations.”

The policy was a partial response to a lawsuit filed by Wisconsin dairy farmer Adam Faust, who claims he has experienced discrimination in three USDA programs — Dairy Margin Coverage Program, Loan Guarantee Program, and Environmental Quality Incentives Program — because they favor women and farmers of color by offering reduced administrative fees, higher loan guarantees, and more money for conservation efforts.

In 2021, Faust and a group of white male farmers successfully sued the Biden administration over similar claims. They argued a $4 billion loan forgiveness program that would have helped farmers of color was unconstitutional because it discriminated against them.

Ask any woman who has tried her hand at farming whether she has faced hurdles that white male colleagues do not and see what she has to say. Ginni Thomas may scream about reverse discrimination, but women who are attempting to compete in American business today know a thing or two about discrimination.

Food insecurity will drive a wedge between people of different nationalities, ethnicity, and gender. The threat of rising food prices will not affect everyone in the same way. At a time when humans need to unite to confront the challenge of a changing environment, the impact of those changes will drive us further apart. We are all on the same sinking ship, but not everyone will be allowed access to the lifeboats.