Since 2007, recurring food-price spikes reveal hunger as a problem of market design and underinvestment, not scarcity. With Brazil’s COP30 on the horizon, aligning climate commitments with food systems could cement policy space to manage markets and advance the right to food.

In 2007, for the first time in 40 years, the world woke up hungrier than the year before. As food prices spiked, riots broke out, and food security became a global political emergency. The UN took the lead in a conversation about reforming commodity markets, building food reserves, and strengthening food systems in the world’s poorest countries and developed ambitious plans to tackle the structural causes of global hunger. The G8 and G20 followed course, mostly championing the familiar language of global market “efficiency” instead of reform. Part of that impetus was the inclusion of food security among G20 priorities, the creation of the G20 Agricultural Working Group itself in 2011, and the launch of the Agricultural Market Information System (AMIS). But the role of the G20 in the debate was mostly one that blocked all transformative policies, in exchange for funding commitments it is still yet to fulfil.[1] With disagreements dragging on, as soon as prices appeared to settle, so did the sense of urgency. Ultimately, neither the G20 nor the UN delivered on its post-2007 promises to reform commodity markets, build food reserves, and strengthen food systems in the world’s poorest countries.

Fast-forward to 2022: a new crisis, higher prices, greater vulnerability but a weaker global response. This was no accident. The same institutions that championed efficiency over equity before dominate the debate today, insisting that market volatility is “natural” and that governments should limit their role to emergencies. The result is a system that stabilizes profit, not prices.

This systemic failure has now collided with a changing geopolitical context. Globalization is fracturing and the UN system is in an existential crisis. But it also coincided with the first ever cycle of Global South G20 presidencies: India in 2022/23, Brazil in 2023/24 and South Africa in 2024/25. These three countries’ diplomatic action, coherently focused on development and food security, has led to a progressive inclusion of important developmental concepts in G20 documents, within a difficult geopolitical context and without the support we had seen in 2011-2013 of other international organizations.

These presidencies did not produce a grand breakthrough in terms of actions, but they changed the debate, expanding the frame of discussion beyond trade liberalization and emergency response. South-South cooperation, too, gained practical momentum, with peers studying each other’s institutions and strategies and thus doing what the G20 was set up to do: learn and bring to the global agenda the successful experiences of its varied membership.

The Structural Roots of Hunger

The dominant narrative treats food crises as the result of temporary, exogenous shocks — droughts, conflicts, pandemics — and assumes that trade and financial markets will ultimately smooth them out through the dynamics of supply and demand and futures trading. But evidence shows the opposite. Trade liberalization has concentrated staple crop production in a handful of regions; financialization has turned food into a speculative asset leading to greater speculation and price volatility; and austerity policies have undermined public investment in agriculture, safety nets, and rural development.

Volatility today is not a product of nature, but of design. Thin, oligopolistic commodity markets amplify shocks. Exchange-rate swings raise import costs for poorer countries. And financial speculation drives boom-bust cycles divorced from real supply and demand. At the same time, decades of wage suppression and under-investment, in both developed and developing countries, have limited countries’ ability to build resilient domestic markets.

These secular challenges add to the well-known difficulty of combining food security and development goals. In particular, the rise of productivity of agricultural workers must avoid displacement that cannot be absorbed in the industrial sectors. This is also why such plans are best achieved at the regional level, through collective planning and a coordinated fiscal expansion in all partner countries.

In short, global hunger is not a food-availability problem. It is a development problem. And development requires public coordination, active fiscal policy, and space for countries to manage markets — not just react to them.

A Global South Awakening

Against this backdrop, the recent G20 Presidencies of the Global South - India, Brazil, and South Africa - have tried to redefine the mainstream narrative.

Of course, it was a process. India passed the Deccan High Level Principles but failed to get consensus on its proposed declaration, which reflected its own view of food security as part of a developmental and human-centered global economic approach. But Brazil’s Mato Grosso Declaration was able to secure unanimous agreement on a justice-oriented framework, emphasizing equality, development, and the right to food.

In 2025, South Africa took this approach further by creating a dedicated G20 Task Force on Food Security, focused on food price stability. For the first time in a G20 document, the Task Force outcomes recognized specific developmental challenges, such as the impact of exchange rate risk on food insecurity, and introduced the agroecological approach to farming, highlighting sustainable and locally grounded solutions. Together, these measures signal a broader vision of food security, one that includes development, justice, resilience, and local agency. What’s more, for the first time the G20 language explicitly acknowledged that domestic production and regional coordination are as vital as trade to ensure food security. The resulting Ubuntu Approaches to Food Security and Excessive Price Volatility mark a subtle but significant shift, reflecting how countries are now explicitly affirming national economic security, which translates into active public market participation in various sectors.

But the road to sustainable development, and zero hunger, is still long and several obstacles prevented the G20 from taking a tougher stance.

The G20 Food Security Task Force: what worked and what did not

A focus on price stability seemed like an obvious move for the South African G20 presidency. Recent food-inflation spikes have had severe economic and social impacts, in developed and developing economies alike. Moreover, stabilizing prices has the potential to align the interests of net food-importing and exporting countries - both represented in the G20 - by providing greater predictability for costs and revenues. Finally, meaningful progress in this area requires global coordination, making the G20 an appropriate forum.

However, the topic quickly proved controversial. The commissioned background studies produced sharply different diagnoses and policy recommendations, mirroring the divide among G20 members (FAO forthcoming, UNCTAD forthcoming, Weber et al. 2025).[2] Even the premise of focusing on price volatility itself was questioned.

Developed economies resisted proposals to regulate commodity markets, curb speculation, or endorse buffer stocks beyond humanitarian reserves highlighting how uneven the rules remain. The USA, EU, Japan and other developed economies maintain public stockholding, support domestic production, and intervene in markets when necessary to guarantee food security and stable rural incomes. However, many of them continue to frame active food-price management as “inefficient”, while using fiscal policy and subsidies to secure their own agricultural resilience. This hypocrisy entrenches dependency: developing nations are told to open their markets, but not to stabilize them.

Significantly, still, the G20 process appears to have sparked a debate in South Africa and in the SADC region, for instance on the creation of a white maize buffer stock (IEJ 2025). This debate was significantly enriched by exchanges with Brazilian and Indian G20 delegations about their own experiences, giving more pragmatic meaning to the G20 Global Alliance against Hunger and Poverty - brokered by Brazil during its presidency - as a repository of practices and a knowledge sharing platform.

Agroecology: The bridge to COP30

While uncertainty lingers over the G20’s next move, under the upcoming US presidency, the COP30 led by Brazil could become a pivotal moment to advance food security. This COP is expected to focus on accelerating what already works, not grand declarations or new promises, with food systems and agriculture finally expected to top the climate agenda. Agroecology, long sidelined as too niche or idealistic, is now emerging as the bridge between the climate and food crises: aligning resilience, sustainability, and development. Embedding agroecology in the next round of climate commitments (NDCs 3.0) could finally connect the dots between climate, hunger, and justice. But doing so requires the lessons of the recent G20 cycle to carry through: price stability, regional cooperation, and policy space for developing countries. Most importantly, this will require strong leadership and coordination between Global South countries.

Conclusions: Towards an alternative vision

Today, as regions and countries turn inward in search of security, deep global inequalities continue to shape economic outcomes. Developing countries face structural challenges and remain technologically and financially dependent on developed economies. The developmental approach to food security addresses these structural causes but requires global coordination and the realization of an alternative global economic framework: a system of coordinated regionalisms, that respects national security but also secures sustainable global demand creation, guaranteeing development and food security for all.

Progress in including some of these concepts in the G20 documents suggests that it is possible to work collectively toward such vision. Alongside the importance of strong leadership from the Global South lies the responsibility of the Global North to help drive equitable and sustainable outcomes. This involves not only a willingness to renegotiate global rules, such as those governing intellectual property, but also a shift in economic policy, abandoning export-led strategies and domestic wage suppression.

The alternative is to descend into a chaos of competing powers, in which the vulnerability of developing countries would increase, but so would the exposure of developed economies to commodity supply and price volatility and low global demand, leading to sluggish growth and widened inequality everywhere.

*Both authors work at the Institute for Economic Justice (IEJ), a Johannesburg-based progressive economics think tank, and participated in the G20 Food Security Task Force negotiations as resource partners to the South African Presidency.

[1] For instance, in 2009, G20 requested the World Bank to create a trust fund to help implement the L’Aquila commitments by G8 leaders in July 2009, worth a disbursement of 20 billion dollars in three years, and so the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP) was launched in 2010. So far (2025), the fund has only raised 2.4 bn dollars (between G20 countries and private donors).

[2] The G20 Task Force on Food Security commissioned three studies, two of which are yet to be publicly available: (1) Global macro-economic factors and key drivers impacting global food price volatility, domestic food prices, affordability, and accessibility of food (FAO); (2) Exploring the feasibility of various commodity price stabilization techniques at regional and global levels (UNCTAD); (3) Food Price Stabilization in an Age of Overlapping Emergencies: The case for multilevel buffer stocks (UMass Amherst). **