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Comment by ginko | Hacker News Reader

That's nice and all but it doesn't really help countries like Egypt that import over 60% of the wheat they consume.[1]

[1] https://theconversation.com/russia-ukraine-crisis-poses-a-se...

If the shortfall in exported wheat is ~1% of global production, and farmers in other countries (India, USA) already are planting more to make up for it, what is preventing Egypt and others from importing from those other countries to replace Ukraine/Russian exports?

What am I missing?

Political will, removing subsidies for farmers, logistics of actually shipping wheat, climate change, etc.

> Political will

Of who? Don't the farmers who grew extra wheat want to sell it? Or are you talking about governments preventing wheat exports (I know that has happened in the past).

> removing subsidies for farmers

Not sure how that is germane. What do you mean?

> logistics of actually shipping wheat

That's a great point! Shipping from the Black Sea ports to Egypt/other ME nations is surely cheaper than sending wheat from India/Aus/USA to those areas.

> climate change, etc.

Sure, that's a threat to wheat (and food in general) everywhere and will be for decades. Do you see it as particularly acute/relevant to the current situation? I don't.

How is climate change preventing Egypt to import wheat from India instead of Russia?

By causing a previous rise in food prices in the region, which caused a hungry merchant to immolate himself, which caused widespread protests and, ultimately, unrest including the Syrian war, which allowed Putin to test his air force, creating the smug attitude that he could invade the Ukraine.

The previous rise in food prices also being attributable to the Russian heatwave of 2010 being the link to climate change.

So spring wheat is harvested in the fall, and won't be planted for a little bit in the US, because it's just now starting to get to spring in many states. Winter wheat, which would be harvested this spring, should've been planted months ago.

So there's a gap in production, regardless of where they get their wheat from, I guess is what I'm trying to get at.

From the twitter thread:

> And the world's farmers already started planting more wheat 4 months ago, when wheat futures rose due to possibility of Black Sea conflict.

> India went all-out planting more wheat, looks set to continue a 3yr streak of rapidly increasing wheat exports. The US planted four MILLION more tons more wheat seed last fall than usual. Aus, Canada, Argentina, South Africa, even Brazil getting in on it.

The author's credentials: "I'm Sarah Taber, a crop scientist with 23 years in agriculture. I started out in field work at 14, put myself through crop school, and got a front-seat view of the dirty underbelly of the farm trade." https://www.patreon.com/user?u=5610560

Here are the last 6 years of winter wheat crop reports in the USA [1]. I don't believe that the slight increase in winter 2021/spring 2022 planting in the USA is anything other than a normal variation. I make no claim to know anything about the rest of the world, but I am skeptical that expectations of a Black Sea conflict has anything to do with planting 4 months ago.

PS, you can get even more data, further back in history, directly from the USDA [2], but it is a little difficult to navigate this site. This link [3] might work for everyone, it is a query for acres of wheat planted all the way back to 1919.

[1] https://usda.library.cornell.edu/concern/publications/z890rt...

[2] https://www.nass.usda.gov

[3] https://quickstats.nass.usda.gov/results/64834CCE-2C3A-39A1-...

> Winter wheat, which would be harvested this spring

Since this is a site that cares about accuracy, I'll mention that while winter wheat is planted in the winter, it's harvested in the summer or fall. It doesn't grow fast enough to be harvested in the spring. Instead, it's a way of getting a boost on the season by getting the roots established early. I don't think there is anywhere it can be harvested early enough that one can plant two crops per year in the same field. More details and dates for the US: https://www.machinefinder.com/ww/en-US/faq/when-is-winter-wh...

(If you want to claim that you are technically correct, I'll concede that it is true that hypothetical Florida or Alabama winter wheat might be harvested in May. I hadn't even known that they grow winter wheat there!)

> I'll mention that while winter wheat is planted in the winter, it's harvested in the summer or fall.

Who is harvesting winter wheat in the fall? Even here in snowy Canada it's a late harvest if the winter wheat comes off in August. Mid-July is typical. Spring wheat is a different story.

Hmm. The page I linked shows Idaho, Minnesota, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming with a harvest season extending into September. But other than Idaho (Sept 14) not by much. So technically I might be right, but only in the same way that "Spring" is also correct for the deep South.

I had assumed that most of Canada would be later than the Northern tier of the US, but apparently I'm wrong. I wonder if it's because the summer days get longer the farther north you go, and at some point you actually get earlier ripening? Or maybe it's all local weather. In any case, thanks for the correction.

> I had assumed that most of Canada would be later than the Northern tier of the US

It is, but you don't find much winter wheat outside of Southern Ontario, which is actually pretty far south in the grand scheme of things. The most southern end of the province is on the same plane as California.

The Canadian prairies, where most of the wheat is grown, are all about the spring wheat. That's typically a September harvest.

> Idaho, Minnesota, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming

Only one of those states is not contiguous with Canada. Given much of the same environment, they share a lot of the same farming practices as western Canada. In other words, your dates no doubt include spring wheat, despite what the opening section of the document says. This explains the wide variances (July - September) in some cases, with winter wheat being the early crop and spring wheat being later.

The author frames the problem less as a wheat production problem and more as a shipping problem.

> Again, specific places are facing EXTREMELY REAL wheat supply problems. MENA usually sources from Ukraine. Switching supply chains to India & other sources takes extra time, & if they're further away from India and Ukraine, it takes longer for supplies to get there.

FYI, MENA = Middle East / North Africa

> What these places are facing is a SHIPPING shortage. Not a lack of enough wheat in the world. Their food supply chain problems are still dangerous. A local, shipping-induced shortage that lasts a week can still kill you.

A sincere question:

Would it not then be helpful to support these new or temporary supply chains as a war effort? Shouldn't that fall under humanitarian aid?

If the shortages are in rail lines, grain elevators, shipping terminals, bulk cargo ships, etc...no sort of "support" can create those at all quickly.

Trucks. Lots and lots of trucks.

Leaving aside the issue that trucks can't move stuff across oceans, how do you get the extra trucks to where they are needed?

As a Romanian I visited Lviv a few years ago. There were some disaster potholes right past the border. It took 1 hour to go through say, 10km with a small car. Unless those roads get fixed, I expect only military or otherwise rugged trucks to be able to pass quickly. Otherwise, you'd need a lot of trucks to get a significant flow of goods.

Example:

https://www.google.com/maps/@48.0388842,22.9469939,3a,75y,33...

Ah, looks barely worse than roads in the Silicon Valley. Maybe that's why everybody drives SUV and pickup truck over here.

That's why the Russians de facto imposing a blockade on Odessa and generally speaking on the Ukrainian ports at the Black Sea is so important to them.

Also Romanian in here, from the Southern part of the country where we happen to grow lots of wheat. We're also close by the Danube, which helps a lot with transport (companies like Cargill have invested massively during the last decade in here).

Cargill is in the running for world's most evil corporation. Competition is stiff and enthusiastic.

Nestle? BASF/Monsanto? Exxon? CCP? Halliburton? We might not recognize the name of the leader.

Probably helps that they're in private hands, which I don't know how they managed to do for so long.

Lots and lots of snorkel kits.

Ships

Not sure about the EU, but the US has a massive truck driver shortage already.

Is there really a shortage or are salaries just not high enough to attract candidates?

Agree.

If the options are:

- kill more people to end the war and return wheat supply

- send more people to potentially die while killing more people to end the war and return the wheat supply

- or pay more to get wheat to where it needs to be to ensure other people don't die of starvation during this war.

I truly wish that the answer was: - pay more people to get wheat where it needs to be

I think China may step up here, as it is a great opportunity to promote their One Belt, One Road Initiative. And they will be one of the countries with excess wheat to sell. And it will make Australia look stupid if they have wheat but no boats and no signature on the agreement.

Another step up opportunity for China would definitely be problematic for the US

Problem for US hegemony. For the US, its likely a net benefit in that in buying cheap Chinese wheat, those consumers will be more able to afford expensive american ones

Agreed, and that cheap chinese wheat would be a massive problem for US hegemony on which many, many things in the US and adjacent economies rest.

Yeah...I was thinking ships from India and trucks from the east for example.

The physical wheat may exist, but it may not be possible to supply it at the same prices (especially given increased transportation costs due to energy prices). There may be no physical shortage, but if prices for wheat increase 50% in Egypt then many people will go hungry.

> and farmers in other countries (India, USA) already are planting more to make up for it

Are they? Fertilizer prices are up 3x-5x, depending on where you look, due to Russian export restrictions, so for many farmers it's cheaper to wait it out and give the soil a rest.

Planting reports have only started trickling in, so we don't have a good global view of what has been planted in spring 2022.

Most wheat was planted 4 months ago, according to the author.

Contrary to what the US media and current US administration are saying, we had major issues before Russia invaded Ukraine. This idea that the Russia invasion is responsible for all these problems is ludicrous. Yes, it has made them worse but it is not the root cause. The fertilizer shortage was happening at the end of last year. You know the 4 months ago you quoted.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/25/fertiliz...

Some farmers were delaying buying fertilizer, according to that article. Nothing in that article indicates that they were not planting because of a "shortage." Prices were simply higher and some people were betting on them going up and some were betting on them going down.

I'm in agreement with the idea that this isn't primarily caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Read the author's other thread on fertilizer for more context on that.

She says it's primarily a shipping problem, not a production of fertilizer problem. Which tracks with the idea that this is simply another example of the global supply chain snarling things up.

> so for many farmers it's cheaper to wait it out and give the soil a rest.

If you play your cards right, and Mother Nature plays nice, this could be the most profitable year of farming seen in a long time. Costs are up, yes, but the income potential is up even more. Why would anyone choose this year, of all years, to "give the soil a rest"?

Because you need the cash up front to buy the ingredients - seed, fertiliser, diesel - all more expensive than last year. (Not saying you’re wrong though.)

The land is going to be your largest expense in the typical case. If you truly can't come up with the money for inputs, how are you going to carry the land? You can often push your land costs until after harvest, but if you don't have the harvest to pay for it... And if you know you won't be able to put a crop in due to budgetary constraints, why wouldn't you rent it out to another farmer? There are lineups of hungry farmers ready to spend whatever it takes to find new ground to work.

I find it hard to believe that land is going to lay fallow this year specifically because of what's going on. Certainly people are adjusting what they plan to grow to optimize for the situation. That is definitely happening.

That is the easy part, any farmer these days is already selling their crop before it is planted. They let investors and insurance take the major risk, between the two they are guaranteed to break even, and if there is anything left over because of a good year (there normally is) that is profit. if investors are not willing to buy their expected crop at the price needed to break even the farmer doesn't plant at all.

With the high temps at the poles this year already. I have my doubts that Mother Nature is going to play nice.

Wheat is a winter crop in India FYI, a lot of the mass grain production switches to rice in the spring/summer season.

By the same Dr Sarah Taber: https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/150780888453416961...

>What am I missing?

Shifting suppliers on this scale in normal times isn't a quick process. Right now global logistics are still a complete & total mess.

With great uncertainty, $cost becomes somewhat disconnected from supply. Right now futures are up about 40%. Availability won't mean much if it isn't affordable, and countries need to lock in supply because it's not really a JIT distribution system (see previous point on logistics). If the war has disrupted your deliveries 3 months out, you need to lock in new contracts now (if not 3 months ago) to keep supply moving.

Grain is shipped in large specialized dry bulk cargo ships. It’s a lot closer to ship from Ukraine to, say, Egypt than to ship from Australia or Canada or even India. If you ship your grain N times farther, you need N times as many ships to make the same number of trips. Those ships don’t exist or can’t be mustered on short notice, so you have to use some other kind of (less-specialized, less efficient and more expensive) shipping.

Even if you can manage to get all of the grain where it needs to go on new routes, the price of grain is going to go up substantially in places previously importing from Russia/Ukraine, and the logistical changes will cause second-order disruptions to other global shipping.

Thanks for the added detail-- I wasn't aware of details specific to the Ukraine <-> Egypt supply chain, and this demonstrates extremely well the difficulties of shifting supply sources.

If anyone else is wondering, the largest ships carry 300,000 DTW, which is 300,000,000 kg each of which has 3400 kCal. Daily caloric intake of 2,000 may be suitable average, meaning that one ship can supply all energy needs for 1.5 million people and one year.

(3700 * 300000 * 1000) / (365 * 2000)

Keep in mind that grains are not only used for human consumption though. It's also used for animals. Egypt has 10M cattle alone [1] and a 1,000lb animal needs roughly 7x the calories as a person. [2] So that same largest cargo ship will only feed about ~200,000 cattle, requiring 50 such ships to feed the cattle population.

They produce about 1.8 billion heads of poultry [3], and in total only about 1/3 of their animal feed requirements are produced domestically [1].

Animal feed appears to be in a different category from other grain imports for human consumption, probably because it really is a separate product containing a mixture of grains and nutrients from other sources. Unfortunately though, much of it is also imported from Ukraine [4] which has banned all exports of grains for now, and it's probably a reasonable assumption that this will include grains used in animal feed, since the issue is the food security of their own people.

Eqypt is going to need a lot more newly-sourced grains or grain-based products, a large # of container ships full of it.

[1] https://apps.fas.usda.gov/newgainapi/api/Report/DownloadRepo...

[2] https://cals.arizona.edu/forageandgrain/sites/cals.arizona.e...

[3] https://crimsonpublishers.com/cras/pdf/CRAS.000502.pdf

[4] https://www.feednavigator.com/Article/2016/09/19/USDA-Egypti...

I mean, that is just an advertisement to reduce meat production and focus on starch based calories for humans rather than supplying to inefficient meat production.

I was thinking much the same as I wrote it, but didn't want to overburden an already long comment. Here though, I'll say that large cattle consume about 30 calories for each single calorie their meat will provide. Poultry seem more like 10 to 1.

I'll own up to some level of hypocrisy on this as I am not a vegetarian, but I also won't complain much if further population growth makes meat consumption unsustainable when it means people starve. (I don't think we're there yet: world hunger right now seems to be more about other factors, economical and otherwise. I'm open to opposing viewpoints on it though)

While the largest bulk carrier ships can indeed carry 300,000 tons of cargo, these ships are usually used to transport iron ore or other ores. It is very rare that wheat is transported on ships that carry more than 70,000 tons. The main reason is that neither origin or destination port logistics allow for larger shipments, and most buyers cannot store such large quantities of wheat.

It seems that ships need to be specifically fitted out for something like grain transport as well. I'm sure there can be some reworking of things but it's bound to take time and resources and further boost cargo prices, and slow down on/offloading at ports and create additional bottlenecks.

I'm tentatively optimistic that this situation isn't going to mean mass famines, but there will be a significant monetary cost and likely some human cost as well.

> If you ship your grain N times farther, you need N times as many ships to make the same number of trips.

Which would be really bad if it was a global increase, but when it's a tiny sliver of the market you only need a sliver of spare capacity.

>you only need a sliver of spare capacity

If there was spare capacity, but there doesn't seem to be much at all. 1 in 10 inter-country wheat shipments will be Ukrainian, and it's about 1 in 7 for corn, probably other crops as well. Repurposing that shipping capacity isn't easy either, from a logistics standpoint. It can take up to a month just for a ship to cross the Pacific, before any other route complexities. It doesn't help that there's over 100 such cargo ships tied up in Ukrainian ports either, a decent proportion of which will be the subset of cargo ships fitted out for bulk grain transport.

The last few years have already shown us how delicate the global logistics & supply chains are. It doesn't take much to stretch them near to the breaking point, and we're already close to that point.

Most world grain is shipped short distances within countries (by rail, truck, canal, ..) and consumed locally. Only a small proportion is shipped internationally, and usually the shortest possible routes are picked (because that is cheaper).

Entirely taking out Ukrainian grain shipments is not a small sliver of the total amount of long-distance grain shipping, but instead requires a significant increase in the total deadweight-ton-miles. We are talking about taking 10%+ of international wheat/corn/barley trade and making it travel 3–6x further than it otherwise would, in an industry that usually runs on thin capacity margins. (Disclaimer: I am not an expert and have not done a detailed calculation.)

That is a potential logistical nightmare. Hopefully smart people with the power to make large temporary changes are working on ameliorating the pain and keeping everyone fed.

> What am I missing?

Logistics.

Food scarcity is a problem not of supply but of transport. More wheat in the American heartland doesn't help Egypt if every truck, ship and port is booked out for six months. More rice produced in India doesn't help if half of it rots en route to the city.

This famine is primarily a logistics problem not supply.

She talks about this further down in the thread, making it her main point:

and

> To solve that problem, we gotta start with being clear on what the problem IS!

> We haven't! We decided it's a wheat shortage, not a shipping shortage.

> So investors panicked, drove up the price of wheat, & made it even harder for these places to get new import shipments launched

As an aside, I found that fascinating that Egypt is such a huge grain importer.

In the ancient world, Egypt was one of the largest grain producers and basically fed the Roman Empire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Egypt#Vital_st...

Looks like the population went from ~15.4M in 1934 to ~100.5M in 2020. I'd bet that neither the area devoted to agriculture, nor the productivity (per unit area) increased by anything resembling that ~553% increase.

Probably it did. It did in the US over that time. Modern farming practices raised yields on some crops from ~20bu per acre to around 200 today.

Perhaps. But to skim over Egypt's economic history - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Egypt#History - their only substantial exports, back in the 1930's, were agricultural products. I'll guess that the British Empire was not generously subsidizing Egypt's food imports then, nor were there millions of free-spending tourists to be paying, nor...

Edit: Okay, perhaps Egypt had replaced many of its wheat fields with cotton fields by the 1930's, and was buying food with the cotton money. The British cotton industry might have loved that...but "massive food imports paid for with a cash crop" is a dangerous strategy to play long-term, or on a national scale. And Egypt threw off the last of the British yoke in the mid-1950's.

That is ironic given they where the grain suppliers of ancient rome? [1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cura_Annonae

Why is it no longer possible for Egypt to grow its own wheat?

They do, but their population has also ballooned far past what their own agriculture can supply.

Slightly informed guess is that the highly productive but water-constrained farmland of the nile valley is better used for value crops, like fresh fruits and vegetable, than a staple such as wheat which is more cheaply grown elsewhere.

Edit: there’s a great writeup about “hoop” style greenhouse farming there and how productive and water efficient it is… but the article escapes me presently

Edit2: ah! Here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/dining/norwich-meadows-fa...

Egypt is mostly desert, the only arable land is on the banks of the Nile.

While I was there this winter, I saw huge new plantations of dates? or palm (oil)? in the western desert sucking up the underground aquifers....fields with cows grazing there... also they're probably growing wheat....doesn't look sustainable but what do I know about the politics of economic corruption.... bread is dirt cheap, it being a bit more expensive might lead them to improve their diet somewhat... I mean their dates are fabulous...

There are probably some plants that grow better in Egypt than any other place. "Comparative advantage" makes you eternally dependent on the benevolence of other nations because wheat is more important than dates. The idea that Egypt has the same negotiating power as the wheat exporting nations is laughable.

In principle, one could attempt a afforestation project in Africa and it would pay dividends over centuries, but the current system doesn't reward longevity or sustainability.

There are far, far too many people in Egypt. Egypt has had plans for decades to irrigate large parts of the desert to help solve the problem, but so far it hasn't gotten much further than the planning stages.

Egypt gets most of its food aid from Saudi. Saudi is entirely reliant on wheat imports and tried to grow wheat in the desert to no avail.

In the past decade, Egypt has been reliant from Saudi, UAE and Kuwait. This has always been so.

According to Reuters, Saudi Arabia produces 2.5 million tons of wheat annually, enough to meet domestic demand.

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL08699206

That article is dated 2008. Since 2016, they stopped all wheat production in Saudi Arabia.

From the same 2008 article: https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSL08699206

[..] The kingdom aims to rely entirely on imports by 2016.

"The reason is water resources," said one official, who did not want to be identified.[..]

https://www.world-grain.com/articles/15070-saudi-arabias-whe... - 2021 article

There is a lot of chatter about abundance and technology..but the harsh truth that everyone ..esp those whose voices get amplified ..is avoiding is that we simply don’t have enough sustainable and renewable resources to feed 8 billion.

When the expected depopulation curve occurs in 2050ish, hopefully we wouldn’t have depleted all our natural resources because in the next 100 years, there will be far fewer humans and not enough resources to sustain them.

We have far surpassed carrying capacity. The world can bear about 1-3 billion max. Instead of trying to breed ourselves to extinction and stripping the world of natural resources by running faster to stay in the same place, we should focus on life extension and preservation of human genetic material for future propogation and perpetuation of the human species. It’s the smart thing to do.

In general if you were to take away synthetic fertilizers and rely only on traditional agriculture without over-pumping water from aquifers you start to realize that the population of planet earth is only possible to sustain at its current levels with the current system and if/when parts of that start to go away then some of the people start to go away too.

The current situation highlights the reliance also on global supply chains functioning properly. These are fun times.

It makes a big difference everywhere else, though.

I personally know people in the US who are buying large quantities of wheat and other food in preparation for the pending food crisis. They expect food prices in general to go through the roof because 1/4 of the world's wheat has suddenly gone missing.

While there will be famines because of this war, if Sarah Taber's numbers are accurate then the reporting within the United States has been horribly irresponsible, and it's important to call it out and spread the real numbers.

Egypt - arable land 2.9 pct (more or less constant from 1961). Population - 105 milion (1961 - 26 milion).

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/egypt-populat...

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.ARBL.ZS?location...

It sure does and the article explains it (it’s a transport issue not a supply issue, as the growth in wheat production this year will exceed the shortfall).

Presumably they already bought wheat futures for a significant fraction of demand, and so it is up to the sellers to organize the actual wheat, possibly at a loss.

They have 4 months worth of strategic reserves and I read somewhere planned deliveries will bring that up to 8 months worth. I think the danger is in future if those 8 months worth get burnt through and replacements don't come. That's still an unknown at this point, but it's what I'm personally watching out for in terms of being able to see around the corner to what may be coming next.

On a side tangent, wasn't Egypt the bread basket of rome? What happened there? Did the Nile dry up?

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