By Rhiannon Stevens and Farid M Ibrahim for the ABC
The farmers sleep fully clothed so they are ready to run for shelter.
The Ukraine war has left thousands of refugees hungry, and fears for wider problems with food shortages. Photo: AFP
Their nearby city of Mykolaiv has been the scene of fighting - bombs are falling most nights and there is no running water.
At a desk in Romania, Australian farmer Lawrence Richmond receives these updates from workers at the three wheat and sunflower farms in southern Ukraine that he manages.
Richmond said the farmers, who are exempt from army conscription so food production continues, managed to fertilise the crops recently despite the difficulty of acquiring diesel in a war-torn country.
But it is impossible for Richmond to know if they will be able to harvest or sell their summer crop.
"We don't really know whether there's going to be a market for our grain … and if there's a market, will they pay us? Or will it be commandeered by the Ukrainian government?" Richmond said.
A perfect storm
The war's impact on food production is travelling beyond Ukraine's borders - it is rippling across the world in the form of a global food crisis.
The disruption of wheat and other staple food exports from Ukraine and Russia has sent already high global food prices skyrocketing.
According to the UN's World Food Programme (WFP), Russia and Ukraine combined account for about 30 per cent and 20 per cent of global wheat and maize exports respectively.
Ukraine is one of the world's highest exporters of grain. Photo: AFP or licensors
The sudden disruption to food supply has led the WFP, which provides food aid to the world's most vulnerable, to warn that catastrophe is looming and 44 million people are on the verge of famine and millions more face hunger and malnutrition.
"It's a perfect humanitarian storm," Dr Martin Frick, director of the WFP's global office, said.
"I would say that since the Second World War we haven't seen a humanitarian situation as severe as the current one."
New data released this week in the 2022 Global Report on Food Crisis (GRFC) showed "an alarming deterioration of acute food insecurity".
The report said nearly 193 million people in 53 countries and territories faced "crisis", "emergency" or "catastrophic" levels of food security in 2021 - the highest since the report began gathering data in 2016.
In 2016, 108 million people in 48 countries were in those worst levels of hunger.
The countries currently with the highest number of people experiencing the worst levels of hunger are the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Ethiopia and Yemen.
In Afghanistan, mother of eight Amara, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, told aid organisation Save the Children her family was surviving on bread, tea and spinach.
"I wish I could buy a bag of rice or flour, but we cannot afford it," she said.
"It has shocked us how much the cost of food has increased, I'm too scared now to ask how much the food costs in the market."
Save the Children said Afghanistan was facing the worst food crisis the country had ever seen.
Amara, a widow who lost her job in Kabul when the Taliban took control of the country last year, said her children often had to go to bed hungry.
She said she might have to send them to work to make money.
Afghanistan is facing the worst food crisis the country has ever seen. Photo: AFP or licensors
After Russia invaded Ukraine, the global food price index, which tracks monthly international price changes on a basket of staple foods, reached an all-time high.
But even before the war, global food prices were reaching alarming heights.
"We already had record-high food prices, even in January, that was basically the consequence of two years of pandemic, [and] soaring energy prices," Dr Frick said.
Conflict, COVID-19 and climate change
Josh Hallwright, Oxfam Australia's humanitarian lead, said the forces driving food prices up and leading to the current global food crisis could be summarised with three 'c's: conflict, Covid-19 and climate change.
"The recent war in Ukraine, but also there are lots of different conflicts around the world, and when you're living in a conflict setting, that makes it very difficult to get food," Hallwright said.
"Climate change is changing weather patterns all around the world, changing the way food is produced."
In its latest report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that climate change was already impacting agricultural production and without rapid transformation the world would likely see mass crop failures and food system collapse.
"The Covid-19 pandemic and governments' response to that has changed the way people access food, the supply chains, and that's driving food prices up as well," Hallwright said.
Food prices were rising even before the Ukraine war. Photo: AFP
Food insecurity on the rise
One in six Australians are experiencing food insecurity, and community services are facing increasing demand to step in.
When global food prices spike, more people around the world are pushed further into hunger and poverty.
For the WFP, the price rise impacts how much food aid it can provide.
"Our work has become much more difficult than before, we have operating costs that are $US71 million a month higher than they were two years ago," Dr Frick said.
"That is the equivalent of looking after 3.8 million people for a year. In simple terms, we can buy less and we can do less with the money."
Ripple effect
A looming debt crisis among low-income countries and a strong US dollar is also hindering the ability of some nations to respond.
"We have countries of the global south that are so deeply indebted that they they basically can't get finance on the international money market," Dr Frick said.
"After the Covid crisis, many of the currencies of countries of the south have rapidly lost value, the dollar is very strong and that affects the unaffordability of food globally."
While several countries in North Africa and the Middle East will experience the most devastating impact of the global food crisis, including possible famine, the price hikes are being felt around the world.
In Indonesia, Andi Muliati usually spends 80,000 rupiah (about $8) on daily necessities for her family of four.
"Now I have to spend a minimum of 100,000 rupiah per day since fuel prices increased in early March, which was followed by an increase in cooking oil prices in April," she said.
Muliati, who runs a grocery store with her husband in Makassar, in eastern Indonesia, said her family was struggling to save any money and had started to buy different foods.
Last week, Indonesia banned the export of palm oil, which immediately drove up the global price of vegetable oil.
Indonesian President Joko Widodo said the ban was designed to combat rising food prices.
A driver unloads grain in the fields of Novovodolazhsky district of Kharkiv region, Ukraine on July 25, 2017. Photo: AFP or licensors
Hunt for fertiliser
A shortage of phosphate fertiliser is fuelling concerns that farmers may not be able to get the products they need in time for seeding.
University of Melbourne supply chain expert Medo Pournader warned export bans implemented to maintain domestic food prices could result in further price hikes.
"If it is done collectively around the globe, it means that there are less and less commodities … because more and more countries are less willing to export their commodities, this means that the prices would go up," she said.
Dr Pournader said there were also disruptions to agricultural inputs, most importantly fertilisers.
"The export of fertilisers are also reduced by [major producers] Russia and Belarus and China, not necessarily for political reasons, but because these countries wanted to reduce or maintain the price of grains," she said.
If producers have to pay more for fertiliser to grow crops, or can't access fertiliser, this will impact both food prices and crop yields in the future.
'There's plenty of food to go around'
But Dr Frick said it was important to remember the world was not facing a food production crisis.
"We have a distribution crisis, we have people who cannot afford food that would be available on the global market," he said.
"They are competing in their food needs with richer countries who often take the available grains as fodder for animals or turn that even into biofuel."
Back in Romania, Australian farmer Lawrence Richmond said the war's disruption to global grain markets could be solved.
"I don't fear a great world starvation, there's plenty of food to go around," he said.
"Let's re-mash the whole program and see how things can be done a little bit better."
Dr Frick said there were solutions, especially since the world wasted more than a third of the food that is produced globally.
"If we can manage more fair, more equitable distribution of the food, and help poorest families to be able to buy and access food, we can solve this crisis."
- ABC