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Food prices rising means hunger means social unrest. The developed world is not entirely out of the woods. With low natural gas prices and heavily subsidised f
by markvdb 5y ago
Food prices rising means hunger means social unrest. The developed world is not entirely out of the woods.
With low natural gas prices and heavily subsidised food, the poor of the US should hopefully come out relatively unharmed.
It's going to be worse in the EU and its periphery:
- High dependence on Russian natural gas.
- Lots of fertiliser depends on Belarussian potash here.
- The natural gas crisis is halting lots of energy intensive processes all over Europe already.
- q1w2 5y agoWe over-produce a lot of food in the west. I think there's very little risk of hunger.
- markvdb 5y agoIt's not about there not being food. It's about people being too poor to buy it, many of them in the eastern EU. Some anecdotal evidence that might sound extreme, but actually isn't. I know an old lady over 80 from Latvia. She worked all her life as a university trained economist. Like almost all people her age, her savings were eaten by the socio-economic chaos of the '90s. She has a <400€/month net pension (considered high locally!) and owns her apartment. She mainly pays for utilities, medical care and food. Without her vegetable garden and her family's financial support, she'd be living in abject poverty. What do you think happens when her utilities double, and her food becomes >10% more expensive? Reality is much bleaker than that for the majority of Latvian pensioners. Not all have a "high" pension of almost 400€. Not all are in good health. Not all have financial support from younger generations. Some of them are going to go hungry.