191–200 of 207 posts
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...
On a side tangent, wasn't Egypt the bread basket of rome? What happened there? Did the Nile dry up?
Famine is caused by _local_ supply shortages. The Dust Bowl in the US was a 30% wheat shortage, but it can happen from even less shortfall if transportation is a problem. The US weaponized wheat stem rust against Russia's wheat crops during the cold war, and they were hoping the weapon would reduce total yield by 15% in order to cause major damage.
Source on that?
> During the Cold War, the United States devised Operation Steelyard, a plan to destroy 50 percent of the Soviet Union’s winter wheat using wheat stem rust (TX) mixed with feathers (known as the M1 carrier). If the president approved Steelyard, Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers were to drop M115 500-pound “feather” bombs filled with TX in a 60-day campaign starting in March. The Air Force forward-deployed empty M115 bombs to RAF Lakenheath and Wheelus Strategic Air Command (SAC) airbases for this purpose. The M2 two-pound containers would be airlifted to the Air Force from the TX stockpile at Edgewood Arsenal, Md. TX required an annual revolving stockpile as it had a half-life of eight months. Rye stem rust (SX) was added to augment the inventory. Steelyard was the first operational biological war plan of the United States in 1952 with a stockpile of 0.8 tons TX and SX. Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson made Steelyard a standing capability in 1954 with an arsenal of eight tons of TX and SX.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes - but we're currently in a situation where irrationality absolutely dominates. (And it's not exactly short term)
You seem to be claiming that the prices of many different assets are largely divorced from fundamentals. I'm willing to believe you, what you're saying is plausible, but I apparently haven't been looking at the same data you've been looking at. Do you have examples of some prices you think are bonkers, and reasons why they're bonkers?
Actually, I think the claim is that prices are driving fundamentals rather than vice versa - ie rather than "$STUFF shortage causes rising price", you instead get "rising $STUFF price causes shortage".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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> Putin is a monster who has now killed (directly and indirectly) millions, and destroyed countries Corrected that for ya. I don't offer quick safe easy solutions to above issues. I don't think they exist. Don't vote for Trump-like populists effectively trying to sell rest of western world to Russia just because they are republicans just as you? Don't leave weak states at mercy of all-grabbing merciless powerful indu…
> So, what's the solution to this situation? I wrote this many times, the lowest blood price for subduing Russia is a NATO-wide airborne operation to behead Russian government, and a mother of all airlifts. You fight a mafia state the way you fight a mafia, by simultaneously dismembering, and beheading it. To completely subdue Russia, NATO has an option to do first strike nuclear attack with half of its combined arse…
Anyway such attack would prompt similar ICBM response, they are generally quite incompetent as we can see in Ukraine, but not that incompetent to not have this working.
And nobody in west is going to justify killing few million civilians in Moscow, our society is well beyond that point.
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These places have regulated hygrometry for exactly this reason.
The type of places at risk of food shortages don't necessarily have wheat storage facilities with regulated hygrometry. Developed countries will be fine, and have facilities for long term grain storage. It's the poorest countries that will be hit by rising wheat prices and intermittent shortages.
First of all you're moving goalpost here, the thread started with a discussion about how some people can hoard a huge amount a microchips or wheat to make big profit, there's no reason for this hoarding to occur in developing countries (and in fact it's more likely to happen in countries where capital is flowing, for such a speculator to invest).
Then when we're talking about countries that import wheat, that means taking wheat from tankers in big ports, not some remote rural places with no electricity or running water. In countries that import wheat, Middle East and North Africa that is, theses facilities are critical to the mere survival of the population, so of course they have access to at least the early/mid 20th century tech which is all you need…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Source on that?
Kirby and Carus (2020) “Agroterrorism Perspectives”, in Mauroni and Norton, eds., Agroterrorism: National Defense Assessment, Strategies, and Capabilities . U.S. Air Force Center for Strategic Deterrence Studies. Page 9: https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/CSDS/books/Agrot... > During the Cold War, the United States devised Operation Steelyard, a plan to destroy 50 percent of the Soviet Union’s winter wheat u…
(TL;DR of the following points: Global Supply != Global Availability ) This analysis misses the real issue by focusing merely on global supply rather than the entire system. I'm also not sure of the accuracy of some estimates, that could be fog-of-war, but while the USDA is estimating 7M ton shortfall in exports, Ukraine exports about 24M tons annually [1] and has banned all exports of wheat & other food staples. [2]…
https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/GTR031720...
I think wheat is usually bulk, not containers. I live in Portland, Oregon, that has one of the top US grain export ports and for a while there was no container traffic here. I recall the reporting mentioning that things like buckwheat and lentils shipped in containers and had to be sent to Washington and couldn't make use of the barges that brought stuff from Idaho into Portland but wheat used the bulk transport.
Whenever there are major disruptions like this, I wonder how much of the increase is just due to various people saying "we know people will be desperate, let's raise the price as much as we can" (or a system of indirection that accomplishes the same to make it seem less like that on an individual level).
I do not agree with the author's analysis - the impact on supply and demand are enormous, and the 1% number does not matter. Effectively, the wheat buyer in Egypt (and other importers) needs to pay high enough prices such that: 1. Industrial wheat consumers in Europe/US and elsewhere substitute wheat with other products, making more wheat available for exports. 2. Previously untapped stocks get exported instead of st…
How do you argue that wheat demand is inelastic? Demand for food as a whole is inelastic, but wheat is just one of many, many food sources. Wheat is a cheap food. The second is stops becoming cheap people will shift to other cheap foods like rice or potatoes. I see a more modest increase in demand for alternatives that pulls all prices up, but it’s hard to see how prices skyrocket.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or maybe we need to stop relying on globalized markets for vital production. A country is really sovereign if it produces enough food for its own population. One of the main reason of the food dependency of Northern African countries is ... the EU policies. Huge amounts of public money are given to farmers each year so that their selling prices are competitive on the global markets. Those global prices are lower than…
Wait, isn't there a contradiction here? You said countries need to protect their agriculture to remain sovereign, which is what the EU is doing. Then you blame the EU for protecting their agriculture. Which is it?
I get your point. The issue is the hyper-productivism of the EU's agriculture. Public money, e.g. the citizens' money, is used to ensure revenues to farmers. I have no issue with that. But since that money is public, it is supposed to serve the general interest.
The EU could decide to encourage organic farming rather than industrial agriculture based on Monsanto seeds and pesticides. The latter make possible high levels of production, but to a huge cost for biodiversity and even climate dereliction. And it destroyed agriculture of subsistence, forcing them to specialize in monocultures like banana and chocolate.
We pay our farmers to destroy our ecosystems, polluting the rivers, with proliferation of a green algae on our beaches which vapors can kill a man. So public money is spent to clean the beaches to protect tourism. Farmers themselves have health issues since they are exposed to high levels of pesticides.
All this because the EU, and especily France, need to export food for its commercial balance, instead of producing high quality food for its population.
20%/of pesticides in France are used on the vineyards, which amounts to 3% of the agriculture surface. Around Bordeaux, pesticides are found within the children hair - meaning it is ingested by merely respiring.
The "good part" of maintaining African countries dependent for basic food is to keep them producing what we made them produce during the colonozation., e.g. exotic fruits, coffee, chocolate etc.
The US does just the same. Cereals are heavily subsidized and the same dependency is organized to keep Central & South American dependent for basic food. The soils of the great plains of the Midwest are being mistreated to the point of desertification. Well, with enough water, huge amounts of fertilizers and pesticides, the industrial agriculture still works, even if the yields are on a diminishing trends. But the climate dereliction imposes o the US larger and longer droughts every year.
Food sovereignry is important, but preserving fertile soils in the long term is a must. Biodiversity enablea an ecosystem to adapt to a changing climate, to some extent. Nowadays, the change is far too fast to allow Nature to self-regulate, e.g. to keep the soils alive by the natural selection of the adapted species.
American billionaires are no buying huge pieces of preserved land in New Zeland for no reason. They know. No that it is difficult to know, we just prefer to ignore it.
It's like Putin's threat on Ukraine or the emerging imperialism of China. We all know but don't act accordingly.
The Covid pandemy is the direct consequence of industrial meat production. Too many animals concenteqted on small surfaces in the name of productivity, in contact with humans. Virus emerge, some kill the animals, like the avian flu, and some jump to men, in general indirectly through bats or pangolins or rats ...
If that Chinese lab in Wuhan was studying coronaviruses, it's precisely to have vaccines ready for the pandemies that will inexorably happen since we don't want to change our agricultural practices.
Many scientific reports are gloomy, like the IPCC, because the numerous meta-anaysis of ten out thousands of studies give us a very clear picture of what is happening (the 6th great extinction of species on Earth) and the climate dereliction. 50ºC temperature in Australia, in the Middle East are now annual. Droughts in the US and Europe, huge fires evverywhere.
We are stupid. Big money make people believe in the virtue of free markets to ensure the public good. It just ensure that the 1% get always richer and the 0.1% doubled their fortune thanks to Covid, in less than 3 years. And people turn to billionaires like Musk to save the world(as if he cared) or to populists with anti-liberal agenda, on the far-left (Chavez) but more often on the far-right (Trump, Putin, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Modi in India, Orban in Hungary, neo-fascists in Italy, Christian-nationalists in Poland, Erdogan in Turkey ... just to name those who were.elected).
Sorry for the gloom, I just don't see a way out since democracies are failing to put in power the right leaders. At best, we have some Obama, Biden or Macron, who are not bad guys but in the end, do nothing to correct the economic system. Our democracies keep electing people who protect the 1% class they belong to. So more and more popular and middle class voters elect far-right leaders who have no solution but the hate of their scapegoats of choice.