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Comment by charliea0 | Hacker News Reader

I'm kinda skeptical of the severity of this issue. Apparently Ukraine was expected to export 33.8 million tonnes of corn this year. The USDA says that the US produced 13,691,561,000 bushels of corn in 2019. If I converted the units correctly, that is 383 million tons. Just a 10% increase in production in the US alone would replace Ukraine's harvest.

Now there certainly could be an issue of price and logistics costs in food insecure nations, but I'm not sure the answer is enabling Ukrainian production rather than producing more outside of Ukraine / ensuring countries don't cut off global trade in grains.

Figures from: https://downloads.usda.library.cornell.edu/usda-esmis/files/...

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/export-losses-gi....

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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...

Belarus potash exports, 18% of global supply, were also cut off in January due to US sanctions. This will force their dependence on Russia, with a Belarusian port on Russian soil, and for now they are struggling to export any of it.

https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-17/belarus-p...

Here's some perspective on current fertilizer prices: https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/fertilizer-prices-expec...

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.

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.

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

> 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.

Futures? This is what they’re for. Agriculture deals with shocks all the time. Nobody’s going to give you a centrally planned rundown.

Futures is just how farmers could pay to produce this extra 10%, assuming that everyone involved believes that farmers could deliver at less than the "raised" amount.

Futures doesn't address any of the "how do they actually do it" issues that I raised.

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%?

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.

It was government actions related to covid which wreaked havoc on supply chains.

And endless wars are also government actions.

> It was government actions related to covid which wreaked havoc on supply chains.

A million dead in the US was always going to wreck havoc, not even counting the people in hospital. For all we know it would have been much worse without government action.

> And endless wars are also government actions.

That is not very helpful. Countries in the Middle East dependent on grain from Ukraine had absolutely no way of avoiding the war, and yet will bear the consequences. From their point of view, it is an uncontrollable calamity just like COVID.

> A million dead in the US was always going to wreck havoc, not even counting the people in hospital.

Nearly 3 million people die every year with or without covid. If your claims were true, we would've been facing supply chains issues for decades already.

The supply chain issues are obviously man-made. The who, what, when, where, why and how is anyone's guess.

> Countries in the Middle East dependent on grain from Ukraine had absolutely no way of avoiding the war,

They should have diversified or had contingencies plan already. What have they been doing since the last crisis 10 years ago? Also, the middle east has some of the wealthiest oil producing countries in the world. Let them figure it out and if not, let them remove their imcompetent leaders.

> 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.

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

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