Paul Behrens

speaker

105 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 23 Jul

Paul Behrens’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Rest Is Politics · Britain's Ticking Time Bomb: The Food Security Crisis · 23 Jul 2026 podcast

In high-income countries, for example, how food prices go up and then that really destabilises societies.

We see lots of cost of living worries.

One estimate suggests that in 2023, about a third of the food price inflation was due to climate change.

And so, you can see how this goes, how you get more and more pressure on farmers, on agriculture, that flows through to prices, that makes people unhappy, and then we get more and more unrest.

We see this, actually, a really good example is Trump in the US, where you actually get a vicious cycle, where people are really worried about the food prices increasing.

They vote for somebody who promises to change everything to fix the food prices.

And then Trump comes in and he guts many of the options that farmers have for understanding the climate and responding to it.

And so it makes it worse.

And so food prices go up even further.

And, you know, these are the sort of dynamics I worry about in high income countries.

And of course, in sort of lower income countries, you see increases in food insecurity.

You see increases in hunger.

I mean, the World Food Programme estimates about 45 million more people are going to be food insecure.

And we're talking here about climate change as it has been in the past.

I mean, we've had three of the worst harvests in the last five years in the UK.

But a layer on top of that, the El Nino, as you said, and that's like putting things even more on steroids.

So we're going to get deeper droughts and more floods.

And it...

Some regions may see slight benefits, but on the whole, we're very worried about Southeast Asia, for example, not getting the monsoons, not getting the rains.

Then on top of that, you've of course got the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which we can talk about, but there you're seeing the interruption of energy into the food system.

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