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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

The obvious consequence would be to immediately stop the use of food-grade crops for producing bio-fuel, as long as this war is going on. The amount of loss is mind-blowing - every day, Europe alone is burning the equivalent of 15 million loaves of bread for wheat alone [1]!

The next step would be to tighten meat consumption to further improve the amount of wheat available to feed humans and outright ban Brazilian meat imports when we're at it to stop further devastation of the Amazon rain forest.

And the final step would be to sanction China to hell and beyond for their hoarding [2] which was a major price driver even before the Russians invaded. One might be inclined to believe China fully knew what was about to go down and decided to profiteer.

[1] https://www.euractiv.com/section/biofuels/news/biofuels-impa...

[2] https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Datawatch/China-hoards-ove...

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> And the final step would be to sanction China to hell and beyond for their hoarding [2] which was a major price driver even before the Russians invaded. One might be inclined to believe China fully knew what was about to go down and decided to profiteer.

Why does any country have an obligation to export? I get that other countries might like them to, but sanctioning a country for not selling you something seems wrong. I get that sanctions are coercive, but usually not like that?

I think the implication is that China had previously imported much of their reserves and is now reselling at an opportunistic time. The argument for sanctions would be similar to the argument against price-gouging or scalping.

> reselling at an opportunistic time

Are they reselling? I don't think China is really exporting any grain at all in any major amounts. They can't satisfy domestic demand and prices are soaring. To then sanction a country for not selling to you is kind of bonkers in my mind.

It’s not about exporting, China can’t feed itself. Dependency on food imports doubled within like 3-4 years recently.

Sanctioning a country that can't feed itself for importing food seems even worse?

Without any additional context, of course. It’s the effect on global markets x when/how they’ve been stocking on reserves that can be questioned.

Chinese food (in)security is world food (in)security.

How much of Europe's biofuel crop is food grade?

My understanding (which might be wrong) is that much of the US's biofuel crop is "animal grade," or is otherwise not human-consumable without additional processing (nixtamalization). The latter makes it consumable but limits its cooking uses (again, to my understanding).

Many of the crops are not human edible without extra processing. We can do the extra processing, it’s not big deal if the alternative is actual hunger.

Then feed the animal grade crops to cows and pigs, should still free up a sizable load of human-quality grain to ease market pressure. We need drastic and quick action before famines hit Africa.

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