The World’s Breadbaskets Are Getting Pounded by War, Weather and Trade Spats

The World’s Breadbaskets Are Getting Pounded by War, Weather and Trade Spats - The New York Times

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The World’s Breadbaskets Are Getting Pounded by War, Weather and Trade Spats

Bad harvests and attacks on trade passages threaten to drive food prices higher.

Listen · 8:30 min

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!An aerial view of a combine harvester working in a large golden field, kicking up a wide cloud of dust. Trees are visible in the background.

*A combine harvester threshing wheat in a field in Seeluebbe, Germany, this month. Yields in the country are down for several crops, including wheat, because of drought and heat.

Credit...

Lisi Niesner/Reuters*

By

Somini Sengupta

Aug. 23, 2026, 5:01 a.m. ET

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Wheat is at the heart of the modern diet, and this year, it is facing an accumulation of modern dangers. The breadbaskets of the world are getting pummeled by drone strikes and devilish weather, nudging prices higher amid already soaring food costs in the wake of the Iran war.

Heat and drought have diminished harvests in some of the biggest wheat-producing countries, including the United States, which is expected to have its worst wheat harvest in a half-century, spiking prices. Poor countries that agreed to buy American wheat under the threat of Trump tariffs could be stuck paying abnormally high prices.

The Black Sea, a crucial passage for the global wheat trade, is an active theater of the Russia-Ukraine war, while the Houthi militia’s attacks on shipping in the Red Sea have already forced grain shipments to take a longer, more expensive route around South Africa.

Beyond that, a supercharged El Niño further threatens water levels in the Panama Canal, while drought has reduced water levels to perilously low levels in transit routes like the Rhine and Danube rivers in Europe, raising transportation costs. All this at a time when the global atmosphere is hotter than normal because of a century of fossil fuel burning, threatening the livelihoods of small farmers in poor countries.

The simultaneous troubles reveal the risks inherent in the global food system today. Only a few crops, like wheat, provide most of the world’s calories. Relatively few governments dominate the export of wheat, including Russia, Canada, the United States, Ukraine, and the European Union. Their customers are mainly low-income countries that no longer grow much of the food their people eat.

“The system we currently have in place depends on three things: seamless trade, cheap energy, stable climate,” said Evan Fraser, a professor who studies the global food system at the University of Guelph, in Ontario. “Today, it seems none of these assumptions are met.”

Somini Sengupta

is the international climate reporter on the Times climate team.

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