Eight Weeks to Record Profits
Trump's war on Iran isn't bringing famine to America - it's bringing hunger to global South, stagnation to the global North, and a huge windfall to big oil.
By now, most of you will have seen the viral ‘EIGHT WEEKS TO EMPTY SHELVES’ Substack piece. I wrote a note in response pointing out that the US wasn’t facing the imminent threat of famine – but several nations in the global South are. Trump’s invasion of Iran is driving up food prices, but that’s not going to cause some global, undifferentiated shock. Instead, it will make the poor poorer by reducing their real incomes.
That’s what the 2026 Global Report on Food Crises is telling us, anyway. According to the report, acute hunger has doubled over the past decade. Two famines – in Gaza and Sudan – were declared last year for the first time in the report’s ten-year history. In 2025 alone, 35.5 million children were acutely malnourished, nearly 10 million of them severely so.
These famines were, of course, man-made catastrophes driven by genocidal forces – the Israeli state in the first instance, and the UAE-backed RSF in the second. Actual famine is now rare outside of war. It is very hard to completely cut off a peoples’ access to food in a globalised economy, which make the scenes witnessed in Gaza and Sudan all the more horrifying.
But, while not experiencing famine, much of the rest of the world is still suffering with elevated food prices and acute hunger thanks to Trump’s war. Prolonged disruption to energy and fertiliser trade has begun to impact agriculture, pushing up food prices and squeezing import-dependent countries already in crisis. Even if the war ended tomorrow, six months of inflation are already baked in.
West Africa and the Sahel – particularly Nigeria, Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso – were already under heavy pressure from conflict and inflation before this crisis. Nigeria alone is projected to see 4.1 million more people facing acute hunger in 2026. In East Africa, failed rains, drought, insecurity, high food prices and aid cuts are converging on Somalia and Kenya at once.
