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Food is one of the great bedrocks of human existence. Given its primacy to survival, it has also increasingly become a locus for conflict, either due to famine or as an exploitable vulnerability of even the most powerful countries. Russia’s war on Ukraine made it clear that grain could be fought over in the battle for supremacy, with the whole world dependent on the outcome. 

Today, we have a special episode of the podcast. Our Riskgaming designer Ian Curtiss hosts Alicia Ellis, an Air Force veteran who is now the director of the Master of Arts in Global Security program at Arizona State University. She and her husband own a regenerative farm in Phoenix’s East Valley, and she has specialized in the future of American agricultural security in her own research. She’s also designing a game of her own, called New War, to highlight the complex interplay of challenges that come with new forms of warfare and particularly so-called “gray zone” tactics. 

Ian and Alicia talk about what it’s like to farm in the twenty-first century, Russia and Ukraine’s grain production, Covid-19 and beef prices, and the complete abdication of government investment in the future security of the food supply. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Ian Curtiss: 

I'm curious, how did you get into agricultural security? 

Alicia Ellis: 

I came to Ag in a little bit of a roundabout way. It was not my first career. I joined the military after I got out of college. Then I was in the Air Force for a while and moved all over the country, was deployed a couple of times, and came back and used the GI Bill to get a master's degree in international relations. And then I moved to Washington DC. I took something called a Presidential Management Fellowship, and I spent some time at the Treasury Department and then some time at the State Department. 

After about two years in DC, I just could not resist the pull of the West. I became obsessed with the idea of leaving it all behind and moving out West to marry a cowboy or something. So that is essentially what I did. I came out here, I applied to ASU, and I was working on my PhD in political science and international relations. I met my husband, who is a fifth- or sixth-generation farmer. 

We were raising beef, about 40 head a year, mostly for local restaurants. And we did some direct-to-consumer stuff. People could get on the website I built and order our beef, and we would have it cut for consumers and delivered to their house. We did that for a few years, and then Covid-19 hit, and there was this massive disruption in the meat industry. A lot of people probably remember the empty butcher counters. But we had been stocking up for quite a while because Four Peaks Brewery was getting ready to make us their sole beef supplier, and we needed to stockpile for a customer that large. And so we had thousands and thousands of pounds of beef in deep cold storage ready for their new menu to launch. And three days after the menu launch, Covid-19 shut down all the restaurants. 

We thought we were going to go bankrupt. It was a really bad situation. And a couple of weeks after that, you had Covid-19 spreading through some of the meat processing factories, which was a huge bottleneck in our supply system. So it wasn't that we had shortages of animals, but you ended up with shortages behind the butcher counter because people couldn't get their animals in for processing. 

In about two and a half weeks, our direct-to-consumer sales went from just a small side thing, 500 bucks a month or so, to $20,000. And it was just me and one other person running all over the valley delivering all this beef to people. But it really got me thinking about the connection between agriculture and security, which is what I do now. I run our master's programs in global security at ASU. 

A couple of years later, after Russia invaded Ukraine, we couldn't get fertilizer for a little while. My husband and I farm about 500 acres outside the valley, and my brother-in-law farms about 1,500. When it came time to plant, I think it was early March, and he couldn't get fertilizer. You had the blockade in the Black Sea. Everybody talked about grain, but Russia and Ukraine are huge fertilizer exporters. At the same time, Russia had cut off the supply of natural gas to Europe. You need natural gas to make ammonia, and you need ammonia to make nitrogen fertilizers. So both of those things caused major disruptions in global fertilizer supply chains. 

The prices were through the roof. So not only did my brother-in-law see about a 30% drop in yield that year, but the cost shot way up because of the fertilizer crisis. That got me thinking, okay, you're talking 30% in just two weeks, what if this had gone on a little bit longer? Or what if this happened in May, when the entire Midwest was planting? We could have been looking at a food security crisis at a national or even potentially global scale. 

Ian Curtiss: 

There's food security and there's agricultural security. People have been talking about food security for a while, and it's generally more from the perspective of helping the poor. But then agricultural security seems to be far more about the supply chain and whole system. Am I seeing that right?

 Alicia Ellis: 

That's a good way to put it. A lot of people look at food security. That's not a new thing. And for the most part, it's defined by availability, access, nutritional value and so on. When I'm thinking about agriculture security, I'm thinking more at a systems level of protecting that incredibly efficient system we've built. To me, the two examples I just gave poked holes in our sense of security. 

Ian Curtiss: 

When I did my master's degree in China, we had a class on non-traditional security. We covered all sorts of topics, water security, agricultural security, biological security, economic security. And many in the room, particularly Westerners, had the perspective that these are just topics for paranoid communists — that these issues are kind of interesting, but will resolve themselves because of the market.

And here we are today, 15 years later, our federal government and state governments are actively talking about all these issues, creating new laws and industrial policy to protect our economic security. Things have totally flipped. 

Alicia Ellis: 

You make a good point. One argument I hear a lot when I talk about this is that markets are resilient. But certain sectors like Ag can't absorb a disruption for even a relatively short period of time. And some things like food are existential. You have to think about those things in advance, and you have to think about the unthinkable too. 

That’s one of the things I want to do with the new war game we're building. It's about not just about building something that is realistic or that has already happened or is probably going to happen, but to actually think about the things that could happen, even if it's not necessarily likely that they will. 

Ian Curtiss: 

So much of agriculture depends on fine details. It's a market, so you're buying and selling at different prices. Everyone's trying to find the right opportunity, but you're also dealing with these vast, huge international trends that a single farmer has little control over. For example, I'm curious to hear a little bit more about your farm's access to water and how that plays out in Arizona. 

Alicia Ellis: 

The water question is huge, and desert farming is really important, not just to the United States, but all over the world. It's somewhere where you can farm all year round. They're not growing anything in the winter in Montana, but a lot of the warm climates where you can farm year-round are arid. So we have to have irrigation systems, and we've made incredible advancements just in the last decade or so. Right now, our farm is undergoing a huge investment to make it more efficient, switching to sprinkler systems as opposed to flood irrigation. And it's looking to save about 20 to 30%, which is huge. 

We're also using a newly patented compost that, over time, increases the water holding capacity in the soil. One of the things I want to do with the new agriculture and security project is get some soil scientists in there to start measuring that, because our guess is that upgrade will potentially save another 15%. So now you're talking about just huge savings on how much water you need to farm the same amount of land at the same productivity. 

That would be absolutely huge for Arizona farmers because some farmers have seen their water cut by 50%, and they have to figure out how to continue to be productive and continue to produce food. 

Ian Curtiss:

I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, but it's roughly the 80/20 rule, if I recall. It's something like 80% of water that goes to farmers. 

Alicia Ellis: 

Yeah, I've heard somewhere between 70 and 80. The important thing to remember, though, is that the water is going to produce something else we need to survive. We need water to survive, we also need food to survive. And we're turning that water into food every day. 

Ian Curtiss: 

What's so interesting about metrics too, is that our metrics are generally about economic growth. In the state of Arizona, it's something like 80% of our economic growth that comes from non-farming. So if you're looking purely at an economic output metric, it's like, oh, well, if there's water shortages, then we need to pivot the water toward more productive economic activities. 

There’s also this argument that farmers have been helped too much by the federal government. They've been subsidized by the money put into the infrastructure — the dams and water transport systems — and this water should go to more economically productive places in the state or in the region. That sounds good economically, but then it comes back to where the food will come from so everyone can eat. Does redeploying the water mean greater imports of food? 

Alicia Ellis: 

There are a lot of security reasons not to do that. 

Ian Curtiss: 

Yeah, exactly. So I’d like to get your take on the cultural friction around farmers and cities and the supply chain risk. 

Alicia Ellis: 

Most of the farmland around here is not owned by the farmer anymore, it's owned by developers, who hang onto it and allow you to continue farming it. It gives them a tax break, so there's an incentive on both sides, until they're ready to sell it for more housing developments. The problem you run into is that it's difficult to make long-term investments in your land if you don't own it. So making improvements to water efficiency, building up the soil structure and soil health gets really, really difficult. 

It was interesting to see how that played out in your Riskgame on water. I had what was probably my favorite role in the game, and I just lucked into it. I was a local politician who not only was a farmer herself but was very rooted in that community. That was the constituency who put me into office, and I really cared about seeing the farming community survive and thrive. Midway through the game, though, you introduced a change in my incentives such that I was dealing with, I think, a personal medical issue. I was going to need money, and I had an incentive to sell my farm and sell the water rights, which would enable chip fabs in the state to have more water. 

My character had to make this important choice, with all the competing incentives up against each other. What I decided to do had a real impact on the options of the other players and how the game turned out. It forced us to work on this problem in the context of real human motivations and real human interactions. That's how we actually solve problems in real life. 

Ian Curtiss: 

When you chose your seat, I was not involved in that process. But a little part of me was happy. It couldn't have been a better fit. This is just the sort of thing that is so interesting when it comes to agricultural security, industrial policy and so forth. It's this process of picking winners and losers. You incentivize one industry, and it means you are passively hurting another. 

Like you said, we've seen this before in Ukraine and so forth. It's forgetting about supply chains, forgetting about the complexity of these systems. That’s the sort of thing we need to map out. But who owns that in the U.S. government? Is it the USDA? 

Alicia Ellis: 

Well, I'm hoping it's going to be ASU. That's part of the idea behind this agriculture and national security project I'm working on. Nobody is really mapping it, and like you said, it’s a really complex system and you have so many people that are involved. Somebody looking at the economic response — the list of sanctions on Russia — was not necessarily thinking about fertilizer. The farmer is, but they don't necessarily have the sort of big picture perspective of how supply chains halfway across the world are going to impact what's happening here. 

So what you need is all those people in the same room, and it’s remarkably difficult to do that. I think that's another beauty of wargaming as a method of learning. You can put all the roles in the same room. A big part of the project I'm working on is to actively involve producers and actively involve agribusiness and actively involve farmers and actively involve policymakers and actively involve academics. 

Ian Curtiss:

So who are the different actors in governments or industry that you're looking at? The USDA is so domestically focused. The Department of Defense doesn't quite make sense in terms of watching agriculture prices and supply chains. 

Alicia Ellis:

 There are a bunch of agencies that have an interest in this, but it's not clear who the lead is and how you would respond to a crisis. The key is that everybody needs to be communicating. And with this war game, I'd really like to involve the private sector as well. We have major agribusiness companies that play a critical role. 

Ian Curtiss:

I'm so glad you mentioned private sector. We saw already with the CHIPS Act and medical supplies issues during Covid the lack of awareness of our dependence on private sector. And what that implies is all the data and all the information, all the IP, is held by all these different entities, and they don't want to share it because that's how they make money. 

Alicia Ellis:

That's a good point. You're making me think of the grain industry in particular. I mean, wheat, that's the famine food. Grain is so important to our diets all over the world. There’s incentive to hang onto that information, because the major grain traders are not just involved in distribution, but in the futures markets as well. 

I read a book recently about the “great grain robbery,” which happened in the 1970s. The Soviet Union had a bad year. I think a drought killed something like a third of their harvest. And so they needed to come and secure grain contracts from the United States. 

So they sent someone over. It was the head of their ministry. I am not sure who the big four U.S. producers were at the time, but mostly the same ones we have now. The Soviets went to them individually and secured what was probably very exciting for each company: the biggest single contract in history. And it wasn't until afterward that the companies realized the Soviets had secured large contracts with every single company, which meant that they had now promised more grain than we could actually supply to meet both domestic demand and what they had just contracted to sell to the Soviet Union. So you can imagine what that does to prices. It didn't take very long — really a couple of weeks — to see absolute chaos in the market. 

Ian Curtiss: 

That highlights the fascinating intersection of security and economics. Ag was the one industry where we continued to do business with the Soviet Union. We wanted their grain. And today it's microchips in China, arguably. 

Alicia Ellis: 

Yeah. Although you might be surprised by how much of this is still going on. Ag was one of the few industries that was still able to do business with Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. That is how they get a lot of dollars into their economy even still. Part of that was by necessity. I talked about the fertilizer problem. The immediate response was to exempt fertilizer from sanctions. You can see the necessity of doing so, but you can also see it as a continued vulnerability. 

Ian Curtiss: 

Exactly. And I’ll add that today with the tariffs, it's soybeans — all the soybean farmers across the United States selling soy around the world, and South American farmers trying to sell soybeans to China and so forth. It's a huge issue, and we don't really know what's going to happen with prices, with the economic impact, of the new tariff regime. 

Alicia Ellis: 

I'm glad you raised soybeans. I wouldn't want to be a soybean farmer this year for sure. But you make a good point about the overall system. When you're talking about the economy at a global level, it's sort of militating toward increased efficiency. I mean, that's the idea behind free trade. Take soybeans for instance. We plant soybeans — soybeans and corn are the majority of what the Midwest plants now. It used to be wheat. 

As we've moved to soybeans and corn, a lot of the world's wheat is produced in Russia and Ukraine. Low estimates put it at about a quarter, high estimates somewhere around a third. You have a lot of countries in the Middle East and North Africa that are 100% import reliant or close to it. So even if it is efficient, is it a good idea for a third of the world's wheat to be produced in just one area? Especially when we saw how high prices because of a poor Russian yield led to the Arab Spring. 

As we embarked on this quest for maximum efficiency, we forgot to think about the value of diversity and resilience in our supply chains.

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.