A world grain shortage puts tens of millions at risk

Honestly, just using existing corn less wastefully in the US might solve the problem.

My tinfoil hat head cannon says this is all hype to have a reason to make the price of any given grain skyrocket.

Before the invasion of Ukraine, covid has already wreaked havoc with agricultural supply chains. The war in Ukraine has made things worse but things were going to be bad even without it.

There are more issues than that, such as exchange rates. Also many populations around the world spend almost their entire income on food and still can barely survive. They are very price sensitive. If the price of wheat doubles it's almost irrelevant for us in the west, but potentially lethal for many in the third world.

Famines are rarely caused by the lack of food. The necessary food usually exists somewhere, but those with the ability to deal with the situation are often unwilling to do so. Either they have better uses for the money and other resources or they just think it's not their responsibility.

Logistics I think is large part of it. Another part is going to be the fertilizer shortage.

> Russia also exported 11% of the world's urea, and 48% of the ammonium nitrate. Russia and Ukraine together export 28% of fertilizers made from nitrogen and phosphorous, as well as potassium, according to Morgan Stanley.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/06/a-fertilizer-shortage-worsen...

> Just a 10% increase in production in the US alone

And how does that happen? Be very specific and quantitative. For example, which land gets planted that isn't planted now. Or, which crop gets replaced. Where do the inputs come from and how is that paid for? (Be sure to include equipment.)

Bloomberg notwithstanding, US farmers are actually fairly technically sophisticated. They're also money driven and competent.

> Just a 10% increase in production in the US alone would replace Ukraine's harvest.

Given the fertilizer shortage, the US is most likely to produce 10% less.

Ukraine is a big exporter of wheat and other grains. Combined with the fertilizer shortage, there's not a good way for global production to adjust in time for food security not to be an issue.

Why do you think it would be trivial to just increase production by 10%?

Possibly yes, look what's happening in Srilanka.

Do you mean something like a "causal loop diagram" as mentioned in this article? https://www.transentis.com/understanding-the-beer-game/en/

(albeit at a larger scale and with more products and filter-by-country)

As soon as humans grow multiple stomachs, we'll be all set.

The common knowledge says there is enough food produced for everyone to not go hungry... but people want more than to not go hungry and they want it to be efficient for their life not for the food production/consumption ratio

The global wealthy can afford convenience and excess while the global poor can't afford basic needs. As such "it's just in the wrong place, so it's cheaper to throw away" is a desired outcome for the wealthy not a problem triggering inefficiency. It's also best to not equate food usage efficiency to general efficiency as a lot of the excess is the result of more food being cheaper than efficiently consuming less food. E.g. growing 100 apples to have 100 actually consumed apples takes a lot of effort to make happen. You have to make sure none go bad in transport, all are immediately sold at the store, and that people heavily plan out their lives around eating every apple they buy before it goes bad. It's just more efficient as a whole to make more apples even if that makes food efficiency look worse.

Carrying that forward whether or not there is a "global shortage" (taken to mean not enough produced for everyone to not go hungry) is irrelevant. People are already going hungry today so "enough that everyone can be fed" can't be the controller of why the wealthy can afford excess. The ability comes from their production and purchasing power compared to the world not the overall averages of the world.

Of course simple economics still exists and less of the good will result in a raise of price, the question of course being how much not working from decreased consumptions backwards. That raise in price is only proportional to how much is needed to lower global consumption. It's not a guarantee the wealthy will notice enough of an impact to no longer be able to afford excess. In reality the poor that were already short on food will see a bigger decrease in consumption than the wealthy due to price increases. A 10% price increase in food is only inconvenient for most in wealthy countries but in poor countries many have no choice but to consume less food as they have no more money to spend on it.

If I had to guess this shortage won't be near enough for production to be less than ideal distribution coveraging hunger. That said it'll still affect prices, just probably not enough for wealthy countries decreases in excess to have a meaningful impact on the overall supply.

Yes, we do that to control prices and prevent oversupply.

I tried copy and pasting certain paragraphs from the article here, (weather/price of inputs/farmer incentives/how wheat is purchased by nations/monetary policies/etc) but there are so many compounding global issues here one might just consider rereading the article instead.

It is quite a big deal.

that would be easy if there was an AWS for Food!

Here is the reality, not only the grains but the inputs like fertilizers etc are sky-rocketing. Every body wants to piss of Fossil Fuels with out even understanding how foundational they are to Modern Civilization (I welcome the downvotes but I will not stop advocating).

Say, with me, N P K - Nitrogen Phosphorous Pottasium. Belarus is a major Potash supplier, Natural gas is important for Fertilizer production etc. These inputs are now expensive.

But the policy genius, LOVE Price Controls, so what prices do these guys love controlling, they target staples .. grains, rice etc.

Now if you are farmer, who has to invest more money given the increased cost of fertilizers etc. and the government will come and take away the grain below market rate -- are you going to play the game? That is the game in much of the developing world.. and to some extend even developed world.

So your AWS style solution of spinning another EC2 instance for Food does not work in the real world.

Can't tell if this is a joke or not. One would think that if a farmer could raise output (and thus revenue) by 140% on short demand, they would have already done so years ago?

My father is a (retired) farmer. Wheat is a pretty reliable crop that pays for itself, but you don't really make money on it. So, you grow some wheat, and you grow other stuff, such as canola, in order to get paid. With the elevated prices, a bit more wheat may have been planted this year, but you have to remember that the prices of the inputs have gone up as well, particularly fertilizer and fuel. Moreover, any land used to grow wheat is not growing something else. In the end, it doesn't make a lot of economic sense to increase wheat production when you can use the land and resources for higher value crops.

LOL, tech guys (me included) are SO detached from real life.

This is not a "just spin up more AWS instances" kind of thing.

Based on your farming experience how difficult is it for the average farmer to more than double their wheat production?

https://twitter.com/kannbwx/status/1528832246936920065 ok this doesn't look good at all, time to stock up people. preppers were right after all.

Why is that?

> The war wouldn’t be such a problem if Ukraine received proper anti-ship missiles.

That's very difficult to say, actually; the Moskova was sunk with them after all, but the bigger issue is the abhorrent and indiscriminate shelling of civilian populations by the Russians. Fields with farmers and homes and hospitals with civilians are not of military importance. And yet, Russia keeps shooting them.

The truth is Putin's Kremlin is to blame for this wide-spread shortage and upcoming famine in many regions of the World, the West should just take the funds they seized as seed money to grow wheat in Africa this season even if it's a loss to offset this massive lost in cultivation in Ukraine.

For what it's worth, planting is still taking place [0], it's just being disrupted and will not be as large of a grow as it was prior to the invasion, so the yields will be reduced. I have it on good authority that in Lviv Oblast, specifically in Trasncarpathia things are still going into the ground as planned since Spring.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-nOuy5C60Q

Russia has submarines in the black sea.

Do you mean that remaining primitive hunters-gatherers, as now observed in certain places near Amazon river, would be more of a success?

Our brains were certainly larger on an individual level, but those individuals could never surpass a few tens of thousands, spread globally, the farther the better!