4 ms·

What nobody understands is that this is not happening strictly because of the war or the drought, but because of the fragility of the global food system, which

What nobody understands is that this is not happening strictly because of the war or the drought, but because of the fragility of the global food system, which simply cannot bear any shocks. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/2/024007 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/2/02... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1712-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1712-3 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/19/banks-collapsed-in-2008-food-system-same-producers-regulators https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/19/banks-... We either fix this or we simply won't have a global food system.

commandlinefan 4y ago
... but the only fix is going to mean higher prices.
- Zenst 4y ago
  Though that's not going to fix it, just burry those who are already on the edge financially.
beardedetim 4y ago
I think it is but it's worth asking ourselves: is a global fold system worth the trouble we have to go through?
mrtksn 4y ago
I wouldn't argue against the research but to me, the "global food system" is much more robust than I imagined. We stayed in our homes for months en mass without prep time and prior warning and the food availability barely changed. We are creatures that need to eat multiple times a day and yet we can stay in our homes for months and get fed just as well. Therefore I'm not very worried about the management of the food production and distribution, we are extremely good at it. Thanks to the global nature of it, things move quickly and even though a problem in one location can be felt everywhere we don't end up with millions of deaths in that location. I'm really not onboard with "localize everything" motto because everything being local means catastrophic consequences at local issues. What scares me is something biological or ecological happening at global scale. Something that takes at least 6 months to fix for example.
- Comevius 4y ago
  We are extremely good at it is your take when 900 million people don't get to eat even in times of abundance? If our food system can't take a little bit of war and drought imagine how will it fare when production starts falling. Climate change is happening at global scale, and we must be able to coordinate and innovate on a similar scale to be able to handle it. Instead we have a spontaneously formed a shitty system. Most people are ignorant of this. Some pretends that isolation is the solution, let's Brexit it, some are blaming ethanol apparently. There is no shortage of bad takes on this, but the fact remains that we suck at this.
  - rmah 4y ago
    The people who go hungry are the ones who are NOT well connected to the global supply chain.
  - mrtksn 4y ago
    The system is unfortunately exclusionary of some parts of the world due to extreme conditions at those places - which are much worse than a single war. It's more like decades of never ending wars and extreme droughts. Africa's problem isn't that they don't know how to code and as a result make less money and can't afford food, the troubles there are much much bigger and as a result they are outside of the supply chain we have. And yes, by global event that scares me is exactly the climate change.
bell-cot 4y ago
Literally, untrue - LOTS of people understand. But like the people who understood that launching a space shuttle when the ambient temperatures were running far, far below the absolute minimum spec. for the SRB's...
rjbwork 4y ago
I reiterate my comment from a few weeks ago as applicable to this new context. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31181311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31181311 In this case, the slack is obvious. And it has once again been wrung from the supply chain in the name of efficiency (aka more profits), under the grand delusion that there will never be bad lean times.
husainfazel 4y ago
What you're missing is that the global food system is under attack by bad actors. 1. The US Treasury drew up the list of economic sanctions against Russia and Belarus. Then they pressured the compliant EU to follow. The sanctions no surprises had a predictable impact on global grain/fertilizer and energy supply prices. The US basically sanctioned themselves and the global economy. 2. Meanwhile China was hit by terrible flooding last year and faces record low yields for crops so they are now desperately converting baseball courts and roads because their farmers can't get seeds and fertilizers. Do you know why? Because they're stuck on cargo ships sitting off the coast of Shanghai which has been locked down under the bizarre "Zero Covid" quarantine. This is conveniently being done during planting season when they're already facing a huge shortfall. End result - they are importing more and increasing the global grain/food price further. 3. Whilst China gets hit by flooding, the reverse weather pattern (La Nina) is causing droughts in places like Argentina and Paraguay which produces the majority of the food in South America. So thanks again to our sanctions against Belarus and Russia, we can't get fertilizer to those countries. Similarly 35 African countries get food from Russia/Ukraine and 22 of them get fertilizer from there so the end result is famine in S America and Africa. 4. In Europe, the EU's "Green Agenda" deal means the Italian government can't provide more state aid to the farmers. In Germany, they want to phase out agriculture because of greenhouse gas emissions so they've stopped farmers who want to grow more food. At the same time, the sanctions are making covid-induced food shortages dramatically worse. So you have well timed global food disasters which are amplified by our sanctions whilst back home: a) "On Friday, April 8, 2022, Union Pacific informed CF Industries without advance notice that it was mandating certain shippers to reduce the volume of private cars on its railroad effective immediately. The timing of this action by Union Pacific could not come at a worse time for farmers. Not only will fertilizer be delayed by these shipping restrictions, but additional fertilizer needed to complete spring applications may be unable to reach farmers at all. By placing this arbitrary restriction on just a handful of shippers, Union Pacific is jeopardizing farmers’ harvests and increasing the cost of food for consumers." Not only are they preventing urea and UAN from getting to farmers during the crucial planting season but they're also stopping DEF (Diesel Exhaust Fluid). DEF is used to control emissions in diesel trucks, without it engines can't run. So they're ensuring a complete shutdown of the supply chains across the United States at the same time. b) "EPA will allow a 50% increase in corn-based biodiesel and ethanol fuel mix for the summer" Before Covid even began, we had the "Renewable Fuel Standards Act" which mandates annually RISING targets for the production of corn for ethanol fuel blends. This add major price inflation for food. Now the EPA is mandating another increase in corn ethanol for fuel at the same time as when we have astronomical fertilizer prices due to sanctions we imposed AND we're blocking domestic fertilizers being shipped by rail... that's going to send corn prices through the roof and the government knows this very well. and I'm not even going to touch on all the poultry that USDA are ordering to be destroyed because of "Bird Flu". As I said in my other comment, it's not by accident or pure back luck - it's by design.
haltingproblem 4y ago
Any article with the term "Global Production Ecosystem (GPE)", financialization, sustainability, biotic homogenziation (!) and translational corporations should not qualify to be published in nature. They mean so many things that they don't mean anything (tm). This article has all of them. This is topical doom-mongering, which always works for clicks, but speaks nothing to substance.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
namdnay 4y ago
> What nobody understands is that this is not happening strictly because of the war or the drought, but because of the fragility of the global food system, which simply cannot bear any shocks. Your logic seems strange: "he didn't die because of a car crash, he died because his car didn't resist being smashed into a tree" Sure, any system could be made more or less fragile, and you could argue that making it less fragile would have lessened the impact, but you can't say that "this is not happening because of the war" - of course it is

commandlinefan 4y ago

... but the only fix is going to mean higher prices.

Zenst 4y ago
Though that's not going to fix it, just burry those who are already on the edge financially.

beardedetim 4y ago

I think it is but it's worth asking ourselves: is a global fold system worth the trouble we have to go through?

mrtksn 4y ago

I wouldn't argue against the research but to me, the "global food system" is much more robust than I imagined. We stayed in our homes for months en mass without prep time and prior warning and the food availability barely changed. We are creatures that need to eat multiple times a day and yet we can stay in our homes for months and get fed just as well. Therefore I'm not very worried about the management of the food production and distribution, we are extremely good at it. Thanks to the global nature of it, things move quickly and even though a problem in one location can be felt everywhere we don't end up with millions of deaths in that location. I'm really not onboard with "localize everything" motto because everything being local means catastrophic consequences at local issues. What scares me is something biological or ecological happening at global scale. Something that takes at least 6 months to fix for example.

Comevius 4y ago
We are extremely good at it is your take when 900 million people don't get to eat even in times of abundance? If our food system can't take a little bit of war and drought imagine how will it fare when production starts falling. Climate change is happening at global scale, and we must be able to coordinate and innovate on a similar scale to be able to handle it. Instead we have a spontaneously formed a shitty system. Most people are ignorant of this. Some pretends that isolation is the solution, let's Brexit it, some are blaming ethanol apparently. There is no shortage of bad takes on this, but the fact remains that we suck at this.
- rmah 4y ago
  The people who go hungry are the ones who are NOT well connected to the global supply chain.
- mrtksn 4y ago
  The system is unfortunately exclusionary of some parts of the world due to extreme conditions at those places - which are much worse than a single war. It's more like decades of never ending wars and extreme droughts. Africa's problem isn't that they don't know how to code and as a result make less money and can't afford food, the troubles there are much much bigger and as a result they are outside of the supply chain we have. And yes, by global event that scares me is exactly the climate change.

bell-cot 4y ago

Literally, untrue - LOTS of people understand. But like the people who understood that launching a space shuttle when the ambient temperatures were running far, far below the absolute minimum spec. for the SRB's...

rjbwork 4y ago

I reiterate my comment from a few weeks ago as applicable to this new context. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31181311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31181311 In this case, the slack is obvious. And it has once again been wrung from the supply chain in the name of efficiency (aka more profits), under the grand delusion that there will never be bad lean times.

husainfazel 4y ago

What you're missing is that the global food system is under attack by bad actors. 1. The US Treasury drew up the list of economic sanctions against Russia and Belarus. Then they pressured the compliant EU to follow. The sanctions no surprises had a predictable impact on global grain/fertilizer and energy supply prices. The US basically sanctioned themselves and the global economy. 2. Meanwhile China was hit by terrible flooding last year and faces record low yields for crops so they are now desperately converting baseball courts and roads because their farmers can't get seeds and fertilizers. Do you know why? Because they're stuck on cargo ships sitting off the coast of Shanghai which has been locked down under the bizarre "Zero Covid" quarantine. This is conveniently being done during planting season when they're already facing a huge shortfall. End result - they are importing more and increasing the global grain/food price further. 3. Whilst China gets hit by flooding, the reverse weather pattern (La Nina) is causing droughts in places like Argentina and Paraguay which produces the majority of the food in South America. So thanks again to our sanctions against Belarus and Russia, we can't get fertilizer to those countries. Similarly 35 African countries get food from Russia/Ukraine and 22 of them get fertilizer from there so the end result is famine in S America and Africa. 4. In Europe, the EU's "Green Agenda" deal means the Italian government can't provide more state aid to the farmers. In Germany, they want to phase out agriculture because of greenhouse gas emissions so they've stopped farmers who want to grow more food. At the same time, the sanctions are making covid-induced food shortages dramatically worse. So you have well timed global food disasters which are amplified by our sanctions whilst back home: a) "On Friday, April 8, 2022, Union Pacific informed CF Industries without advance notice that it was mandating certain shippers to reduce the volume of private cars on its railroad effective immediately. The timing of this action by Union Pacific could not come at a worse time for farmers. Not only will fertilizer be delayed by these shipping restrictions, but additional fertilizer needed to complete spring applications may be unable to reach farmers at all. By placing this arbitrary restriction on just a handful of shippers, Union Pacific is jeopardizing farmers’ harvests and increasing the cost of food for consumers." Not only are they preventing urea and UAN from getting to farmers during the crucial planting season but they're also stopping DEF (Diesel Exhaust Fluid). DEF is used to control emissions in diesel trucks, without it engines can't run. So they're ensuring a complete shutdown of the supply chains across the United States at the same time. b) "EPA will allow a 50% increase in corn-based biodiesel and ethanol fuel mix for the summer" Before Covid even began, we had the "Renewable Fuel Standards Act" which mandates annually RISING targets for the production of corn for ethanol fuel blends. This add major price inflation for food. Now the EPA is mandating another increase in corn ethanol for fuel at the same time as when we have astronomical fertilizer prices due to sanctions we imposed AND we're blocking domestic fertilizers being shipped by rail... that's going to send corn prices through the roof and the government knows this very well. and I'm not even going to touch on all the poultry that USDA are ordering to be destroyed because of "Bird Flu". As I said in my other comment, it's not by accident or pure back luck - it's by design.

haltingproblem 4y ago

Any article with the term "Global Production Ecosystem (GPE)", financialization, sustainability, biotic homogenziation (!) and translational corporations should not qualify to be published in nature. They mean so many things that they don't mean anything (tm). This article has all of them. This is topical doom-mongering, which always works for clicks, but speaks nothing to substance.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

namdnay 4y ago

> What nobody understands is that this is not happening strictly because of the war or the drought, but because of the fragility of the global food system, which simply cannot bear any shocks. Your logic seems strange: "he didn't die because of a car crash, he died because his car didn't resist being smashed into a tree" Sure, any system could be made more or less fragile, and you could argue that making it less fragile would have lessened the impact, but you can't say that "this is not happening because of the war" - of course it is