Dr. Alicia Ellis is an Assistant Teaching Professor and Director of the MA in Global Security program at Arizona State University (ASU). She develops coursework on national and global security, economic statecraft, geopolitics, and war and conflict. Alicia was appointed as a Presidential Management Fellow in 2012, during which she served as an analyst at the Department of Treasury’s Office of Financial Research and later as a policy analyst for the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. 

While assigned to the State Department, she studied Russian language at the Institute of World Politics, including six weeks immersion training in Odessa, Ukraine. A former Air Force officer, she served two deployments as an Air Battle Manager in support of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, including three months as the Joint Air Operations Center Liaison Officer. 

She received her B.S. in Political Science from Northern Illinois University, her MA in International Relations from St. Mary’s University, and her Ph.D. in Political Science from Arizona State University. 

After moving out west, she joined the Arizona agriculture community, marrying into a family of 5th generation farmers. She and her husband, Justin Perry, raised beef for Arizona families and restaurants until 2023, supplying many local favorites such as Four Peaks Brewery, Tarbell’s, and ASU’s University Club Bistro. They also own an agricultural composting business in east Mesa, where they experiment with regenerative farming methods on their 500-acre farm. 

Never a light schedule on her calendar, Ellis recently returned from speaking at a conference in D.C. on the intersection of agriculture and competitive statecraft. Here, we learn a bit about that intersection and the importance of food security and national security.

 

 

Says Alicia Ellis, “It’s why the human species has flourished, it’s why we’ve sustained a population of 8 billion people on the planet, and yet we just keep asking farmers to do more.”



Arizona Agriculture: From your vantage point and what you teach as a professor, define, from your perspective, food security. Also, on the flip side of the same coin, put your definition to “food insecurity.” 

Dr. Ellis: There are a lot of organizations that deal with this regularly that have specific definitions they use. For instance, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization classifies someone as food insecure when they lack regular access to enough safe and nutritious food for normal growth and development, and there is a range of severity associated with those definitions. 

But the work I do is a little bit different. What I try to shine a light on is how fragile even the most advanced food systems actually are. Abundance is sort of embedded in the American psyche because it’s been so easy to get our food for most of us for so long, but that system really isn’t as secure as we imagine it is. We got a little glimpse into that during Covid-19, when a handful of meat processing plants shut down as the virus spread through its staff. 

We quickly started seeing empty butcher counters at the grocery store and rationing of meat products and of course overstocking exacerbates the issue when there are shortages, and that’s a natural human reaction. This really exposed the processing bottlenecks in our beef, pork, and poultry supply chains. 

We saw something similar happen in the fertilizer markets after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Those are the sort of vulnerabilities in the system that worry me, especially when you start thinking about how quickly the system can break down whether it’s due to a natural event, or whether adversaries target those key nodes through cyber or biological means. It concerns me that you need so few targets to seriously disrupt not just the domestic food supply, but in many ways, it would have global ripple effects as well. So those are the kind of risks that I examine in the graduate course I offer at ASU on Security and the Global Economy. 

I have an entire section of that course that reconceptualizes food systems as a question of national security. I think it’s important that we elevate it to that level because agriculture plays a special role in human security. It’s really not the benign good we tend to think of it as; it’s a strategic good and it’s existential. 

 

Arizona Agriculture: I recently read that with the amount of global food production and potential for the future, no one should have to go to bed hungry. While we almost certainly can anticipate your answer, what does become the biggest challenge to a country’s leadership feeding and clothing its people? 

Dr. Ellis: There are multiple threats on the horizon in the long term, which are probably the ones you’re anticipating in my answer but I’m going to throw you for a loop and say right now I think it’s geopolitics. And I’ll give you an example to demonstrate the point. Everyone remembers when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 and Ukraine couldn’t get its grain exports out. The world was on the brink of a food crisis because some of the most food-insecure parts of the world were heavily reliant on grain imports coming out of the Black Sea from both Russia and Ukraine. That was a close call. 

But there was a related event that I think was actually a much closer call although it flew under the radar a little bit. Russia was trying to avoid sanctions by insisting that Europe pay for its gas in rubles and when they were refused, Russia cut off the supply of natural gas being delivered by pipeline throughout Europe. This wasn’t just a problem for Europeans heating their homes, it also led to a 70% reduction in European production of ammonia for fertilizers, which caused worldwide shortages and, of course, overstocking again. That meant delays for many farmers in getting their fertilizer before spring planting season, and for those who had to wait, decreased yields. Imagine this went on for a few more weeks and that it was happening all over the world at the same time; we would have had a serious global food crisis on our hands. 

This was generally treated as a blip on the radar from which we quickly recovered, but it’s more than that. It reveals vulnerabilities in the supply chain and dependencies on unreliable partners for our most critical goods. Part of the reason we avoided a bigger crisis in 2022 was because the U.S. exempted Russian fertilizer from sanctions. The United States imported almost 2 billion dollars of fertilizer from Russia that year, and we’re no less dependent today. The world’s leading fertilizer exporters are Russia, China, and Belarus, none of which I would put on my list of most reliable trading partners. This list of providers of the world’s most important agricultural input is also a list of disrupters to world stability who aren’t happy with the balance of power and want to see it shift in their favor. And in the case of Russia, there seems to be no limit to what they’re willing to do to accomplish that, including causing chaos that disrupts supply chains and livelihoods and access to food. So, these geopolitical problems aren’t going away any time soon. 

Arizona Agriculture: Geopolitical experts at the New England Complex Systems Institute identify a specific food price threshold above which protests become likely when a population is starving. This global flashpoint may be hard for us to grasp. Coming out of the military, what additional insights can you share about the volatility of a country due to hunger?  

Dr. Ellis: That’s a pretty well-established linkage, the relationship between food insecurity and political instability, which can also turn violent. To give you an example, Russia lost about a third of its wheat harvest in 2011 and banned all wheat exports. The Middle East and North Africa were hit first and hardest because they import so much of their wheat from Russia, but also because it caused food prices to spike and then stay high. 

When people can’t feed their families, it undermines the legitimacy of political systems, so you saw all these underlying problems – poverty, corruption, et cetera – come to a head with protests and riots that were really catalyzed by anger over food prices. People run out of options, so it’s a catalyst for political instability and conflict. It’s also a vicious cycle: food crises don’t just drive conflict, conflict also triggers food crises, which will in turn, deepen conflict over resources and worsen the humanitarian impact of conflict. 

It’s what the military would call a threat multiplier. There’s actually a famous quote by Alfred Henry Lewis – “there are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.” This goes back to what I pointed out earlier, that this particular commodity is existential. There’s nothing people won’t do to ensure they have it. So, we have to think about it as a question of both national and global security, we have to think about building more resiliency into those systems, and we must think about where our most critical goods are coming from. 

Arizona Agriculture: What region of the globe has the most concern for you? Perhaps another way to say it, what geopolitical flashpoint has you waking up at night worried? 

Dr. Ellis: All of them right now. This can be a difficult question to answer because today they are so interconnected. The first thing that comes to mind is the Middle East both because of the conflict between Israel and Gaza and the potential to escalate into a much larger war, but also because parts of the Middle East and North Africa rank high in food insecurity. They tend to be very reliant on wheat imports, much of which come out of the Black Sea, from Russia and Ukraine, who are currently at war. 

So, then you can’t really talk about instability in the Middle East without reference to this other geopolitical flashpoint because it has an outsized impact on global food security. And if you’re going to talk about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, then you must think about how its outcome will affect China’s strategic calculation in the South China Sea, and if you’re going to talk about that, then you are also talking about freedom of the seas and securing global shipping and trade, which is a primary responsibility of the United States Navy. This is a problem because right now the Navy is also trying to deal with the Houthis disrupting shipping in the Red Sea, which is causing higher prices and supply chain delays as ships are forced to bypass the Suez Canal and go all the way around the southern tip of Africa, which adds significant time and cost and so now we’re back to the Middle East again. So, they really are all connected to one another and any one of them has the potential for cascading effects. 

Arizona Agriculture: According to a paper by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), since 1960, global food production has increased by 390% while land use has increased by a mere 10%. These are the statistics that can give us hope. What else do you think Arizona and American agriculture do well?

Dr. Ellis: Well, we obviously do research and development really well, evidenced by that statistic. We do scale really well. Organizations that accumulate and market for small farmers play a really important role in scalability in a way that allows smaller family farms to survive and compete. That part of the system is one that I think works pretty well for both producers and consumers. 

As a whole, the system also does efficiency really well, but I do think that we should be looking more closely at how we might balance that with resiliency, and we’re probably overdue for a systemic risk assessment of our food systems at a national level, especially given the numerous geopolitical and other risks. The just-in-time economic model that most sectors of the economy follow is a bit risky when you’re talking about your food supply. Markets might be really adept at adjusting and reallocating, but agriculture is different-- when fertilizer supply chains are disrupted, you can’t simply absorb a three-week delay like you can for other goods, and the potential consequences of that on a large scale are incomprehensible. 

I’m also not convinced we do communication very well. We should be working together between farmers, the supporting industries, and government to communicate needs and develop strategies that better support producers and meet national security priorities. For example, as far as I can tell, industry is generally unaware of the geostrategic importance of wheat and the way it’s been used as a tool of U.S. statecraft for over a hundred years, or the way it can be used to prevent and ameliorate conflict so that we can avoid spending a lot more on military solutions. 

Since overtaking the U.S. in 2017, Russia is now the world’s largest wheat exporter, which has led to all kinds of geostrategic problems. Part of the reason the U.S. lags behind in wheat is because wheat is behind other commodities in research and development. That’s something federal agencies could be supporting. It could play a role in educating consumers about the benefits of GMOs. It could be working on coherent trade policy for agriculture that supports U.S. producers, boosts exports, and ensures we’re obtaining necessary inputs from reliable partners, not from Russia. Our partners overseas are concerned about this too, but we haven’t given them somewhere else to turn for the world’s most important food. If we can address some of those weaknesses, then I think it would enable us to better capitalize on our many strengths. 

Arizona Agriculture: Despite an expertise in this extremely serious issue, food security, what makes you hopeful?

Dr. Ellis: At the risk of sounding cheesy, it’s the ingenuity and spirit of farmers. They’re asked to make an incredible lift – feed the world and risk your lives and livelihood in an industry that is completely reliant on something we can’t control, the weather, – and while you’re at it, solve the water crisis and climate change too, while also being the first to deal with its impact. 

They’re really the unsung heroes on whose output we built the modern world. It’s why the United States has been so prosperous, why we can all go to work and do different things and pursue our interests and make other stuff that makes our lives increasingly comfortable. It’s why the human species has flourished, it’s why we’ve sustained a population of 8 billion people on the planet, and yet we just keep asking farmers to do more. And they just keep doing more, they get up every day and keep innovating and keep problem solving and I don’t think most of the world realizes just how much we rely on them to do that. So, I think whatever comes next, farmers will solve that too, because they haven’t let us down yet.