The Hunger Gains

As artillery and missiles continue to blast away at Ukraine’s only remaining access to the Black Sea (and hence to the Mediterranean and beyond), Odessa, the world shudders. According to the August 1st Washington Post, after much wrangling to reach a truce amid Russia’s attack on that port city, “The first ship carrying grain departed a Ukrainian port early Monday [8/1] under a United Nations-brokered deal to ease a global food crisis sparked by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“The cargo vessel, loaded with more than 26,000 metric tons of corn, left Odessa amid fears that the deal, signed in Istanbul in late July, would fall apart after a Russian missile strike on the port a day after the signing… Sixteen additional vessels are waiting to depart, according to the minister, who noted that the expected resumption of grain shipments would provide at least $1 billion in much-needed foreign currency reserves for cash-strapped Ukraine.” If it holds, the agreement only provides for 120 days open access for grain exports. If it doesn’t…

If only Ukraine could continue to access Odessa as one of the mainstays of foodstuffs exported to lower income people around the world, particularly in Africa. If only Ukraine’s once-robust agricultural sector could resume farming without the pounding of artillery and missiles from above. Without these vital grains, millions globally face starvation and possible death.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 2019-2020 Ukraine ranked 2nd (behind the US – Ukraine supplying 10% of global production) among the largest grain exporters in terms of barley supplies, 4th of corn, and 5th of wheat. That was before the war in Ukraine. The expected amount of viable grain production in Ukraine will have fallen between 20% and 30% from pre-war levels, but that does not mean that the remainder will be available to supply Ukraine’s usual buyers. If transportation from those fields is not open, if the ability to use trucks, trains and ships to carry vital grain stores to starving and desperate markets cannot be guaranteed and stabilized, the amount of production just might not matter.

And yes, the war on Ukraine has also increased the cost of petroleum-based fertilizer and fossil-fuel-driven shipping. All of these factors are driving food prices higher; it is in the nature of fungible commodities to settle on global market prices. What goes up “somewhere” can have a global impact, including right here in the United States. But it is just too easy to blame the war for a steady rise in the cost of agricultural goods… since that trend has been going on for years well before the war, almost in lockstep with the global rise in average temperatures and concomitant natural disasters.

An August 1st article in Yahoo! Finance by Grace O’Donnell underscores the long-term obvious reason: “‘The climate is the No. 1 reason why food prices go up,’ Sal Gilbertie, president and CEO of Teucrium Funds (CORN), told Yahoo Finance… ‘It happens all the time. If you look at the last six or seven times that global grains have risen, all but one — and that would be the Ukraine war — are caused by weather, and it's usually a drought. It's usually not enough rain. That's associated with heat. And we've seen that around the world.’

“World food prices in June were 23% higher than the previous year, according to a UN agency report, though they did see a decline that month as farmers in the northern hemisphere brought in new harvests…. ‘We face an unprecedented global hunger crisis,’ UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned in late June. ‘This year’s food access issues could become next year’s global food shortage. No country will be immune to the social and economic repercussions of such a catastrophe.’

“Intense heat waves and droughts linked to climate change have spanned continents in recent months, challenging the global supply of raw ingredients… ‘We saw a tremendous heat wave in India, which is often the world's top producer of wheat,’ Gilbertie said. ‘No one knows that because they use it all themselves.’… In Europe, the record-breaking heat waves missed the winter wheat crop but will affect summer crops, he added. At the same time, he said, ‘the Western corn belt and the extreme American West are facing droughts that are just unbelievable and intensifying.’”

We complain about inflation, but as a rich Western nation, our people do not face mass starvation. We just face costs and reprioritizing our personal budgets. Even American farmers are faced with higher fertilizer and transportation costs. They also face the devastation on their agricultural yields, sometimes losing large tracts on once productive farmland to seemingly permanent desertification. Rains dwindle even as they flood other sections of the United States. Aquifers dry up. Rivers, streams, lakes and reservoirs drop to intolerable levels. All this while underground petroleum reserves, weather resistant, are giving major oil companies as a much as a tripling of their profits from the same time last year.

In the end, those blaming the incumbent administration for higher prices are most from those same regions in the United States where oil and gas interests dominate politics, where voters and their elected representatives oppose spending the necessary funds to contain climate change. They’d rather live with massive fire risks, virulent new levels of tornados and hurricanes, accept decimating flooding and intolerable heat and watch farmland dry up and blow away than spend money to attempt to contain climate change. That even modest allocations to address climate change often cannot generate single Republican votes should be astounding. But it’s now the same-old/same-old… a routine seemingly without end. Until…

I’m Peter Dekom, and I am not sure what it takes to wake up science skeptics and climate change marginalizers, but their children and grandchildren will suffer even more profoundly as a result of their inaction.