> Again, specific places are facing EXTREMELY REAL wheat supply problems. MENA usually sources from Ukraine. Switching supply chains to India & other sources takes extra time, & if they're further away from India and Ukraine, it takes longer for supplies to get there.
FYI, MENA = Middle East / North Africa
> What these places are facing is a SHIPPING shortage. Not a lack of enough wheat in the world. Their food supply chain problems are still dangerous. A local, shipping-induced shortage that lasts a week can still kill you.
Would it not then be helpful to support these new or temporary supply chains as a war effort? Shouldn't that fall under humanitarian aid?
Example:
https://www.google.com/maps/@48.0388842,22.9469939,3a,75y,33...
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).
Nestle? BASF/Monsanto? Exxon? CCP? Halliburton? We might not recognize the name of the leader.
If the options are:
- kill more people to end the war and return wheat supply
- send more people to potentially die while killing more people to end the war and return the wheat supply
- or pay more to get wheat to where it needs to be to ensure other people don't die of starvation during this war.
I truly wish that the answer was: - pay more people to get wheat where it needs to be
Are they? Fertilizer prices are up 3x-5x, depending on where you look, due to Russian export restrictions, so for many farmers it's cheaper to wait it out and give the soil a rest.
Planting reports have only started trickling in, so we don't have a good global view of what has been planted in spring 2022.
If you play your cards right, and Mother Nature plays nice, this could be the most profitable year of farming seen in a long time. Costs are up, yes, but the income potential is up even more. Why would anyone choose this year, of all years, to "give the soil a rest"?
I find it hard to believe that land is going to lay fallow this year specifically because of what's going on. Certainly people are adjusting what they plan to grow to optimize for the situation. That is definitely happening.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/25/fertiliz...
I'm in agreement with the idea that this isn't primarily caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Read the author's other thread on fertilizer for more context on that.
She says it's primarily a shipping problem, not a production of fertilizer problem. Which tracks with the idea that this is simply another example of the global supply chain snarling things up.
So there's a gap in production, regardless of where they get their wheat from, I guess is what I'm trying to get at.
Since this is a site that cares about accuracy, I'll mention that while winter wheat is planted in the winter, it's harvested in the summer or fall. It doesn't grow fast enough to be harvested in the spring. Instead, it's a way of getting a boost on the season by getting the roots established early. I don't think there is anywhere it can be harvested early enough that one can plant two crops per year in the same field. More details and dates for the US: https://www.machinefinder.com/ww/en-US/faq/when-is-winter-wh...
(If you want to claim that you are technically correct, I'll concede that it is true that hypothetical Florida or Alabama winter wheat might be harvested in May. I hadn't even known that they grow winter wheat there!)
Who is harvesting winter wheat in the fall? Even here in snowy Canada it's a late harvest if the winter wheat comes off in August. Mid-July is typical. Spring wheat is a different story.
I had assumed that most of Canada would be later than the Northern tier of the US, but apparently I'm wrong. I wonder if it's because the summer days get longer the farther north you go, and at some point you actually get earlier ripening? Or maybe it's all local weather. In any case, thanks for the correction.
It is, but you don't find much winter wheat outside of Southern Ontario, which is actually pretty far south in the grand scheme of things. The most southern end of the province is on the same plane as California.
The Canadian prairies, where most of the wheat is grown, are all about the spring wheat. That's typically a September harvest.
> Idaho, Minnesota, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming
Only one of those states is not contiguous with Canada. Given much of the same environment, they share a lot of the same farming practices as western Canada. In other words, your dates no doubt include spring wheat, despite what the opening section of the document says. This explains the wide variances (July - September) in some cases, with winter wheat being the early crop and spring wheat being later.
> And the world's farmers already started planting more wheat 4 months ago, when wheat futures rose due to possibility of Black Sea conflict.
> India went all-out planting more wheat, looks set to continue a 3yr streak of rapidly increasing wheat exports. The US planted four MILLION more tons more wheat seed last fall than usual. Aus, Canada, Argentina, South Africa, even Brazil getting in on it.
The author's credentials: "I'm Sarah Taber, a crop scientist with 23 years in agriculture. I started out in field work at 14, put myself through crop school, and got a front-seat view of the dirty underbelly of the farm trade." https://www.patreon.com/user?u=5610560
PS, you can get even more data, further back in history, directly from the USDA [2], but it is a little difficult to navigate this site. This link [3] might work for everyone, it is a query for acres of wheat planted all the way back to 1919.
[1] https://usda.library.cornell.edu/concern/publications/z890rt...
[3] https://quickstats.nass.usda.gov/results/64834CCE-2C3A-39A1-...
Logistics.
Food scarcity is a problem not of supply but of transport. More wheat in the American heartland doesn't help Egypt if every truck, ship and port is booked out for six months. More rice produced in India doesn't help if half of it rots en route to the city.
Shifting suppliers on this scale in normal times isn't a quick process. Right now global logistics are still a complete & total mess.
With great uncertainty, $cost becomes somewhat disconnected from supply. Right now futures are up about 40%. Availability won't mean much if it isn't affordable, and countries need to lock in supply because it's not really a JIT distribution system (see previous point on logistics). If the war has disrupted your deliveries 3 months out, you need to lock in new contracts now (if not 3 months ago) to keep supply moving.
Even if you can manage to get all of the grain where it needs to go on new routes, the price of grain is going to go up substantially in places previously importing from Russia/Ukraine, and the logistical changes will cause second-order disruptions to other global shipping.
(3700 * 300000 * 1000) / (365 * 2000)
They produce about 1.8 billion heads of poultry [3], and in total only about 1/3 of their animal feed requirements are produced domestically [1].
Animal feed appears to be in a different category from other grain imports for human consumption, probably because it really is a separate product containing a mixture of grains and nutrients from other sources. Unfortunately though, much of it is also imported from Ukraine [4] which has banned all exports of grains for now, and it's probably a reasonable assumption that this will include grains used in animal feed, since the issue is the food security of their own people.
Eqypt is going to need a lot more newly-sourced grains or grain-based products, a large # of container ships full of it.
[1] https://apps.fas.usda.gov/newgainapi/api/Report/DownloadRepo...
[2] https://cals.arizona.edu/forageandgrain/sites/cals.arizona.e...
[3] https://crimsonpublishers.com/cras/pdf/CRAS.000502.pdf
[4] https://www.feednavigator.com/Article/2016/09/19/USDA-Egypti...
I'll own up to some level of hypocrisy on this as I am not a vegetarian, but I also won't complain much if further population growth makes meat consumption unsustainable when it means people starve. (I don't think we're there yet: world hunger right now seems to be more about other factors, economical and otherwise. I'm open to opposing viewpoints on it though)
I'm tentatively optimistic that this situation isn't going to mean mass famines, but there will be a significant monetary cost and likely some human cost as well.
Which would be really bad if it was a global increase, but when it's a tiny sliver of the market you only need a sliver of spare capacity.
If there was spare capacity, but there doesn't seem to be much at all. 1 in 10 inter-country wheat shipments will be Ukrainian, and it's about 1 in 7 for corn, probably other crops as well. Repurposing that shipping capacity isn't easy either, from a logistics standpoint. It can take up to a month just for a ship to cross the Pacific, before any other route complexities. It doesn't help that there's over 100 such cargo ships tied up in Ukrainian ports either, a decent proportion of which will be the subset of cargo ships fitted out for bulk grain transport.
The last few years have already shown us how delicate the global logistics & supply chains are. It doesn't take much to stretch them near to the breaking point, and we're already close to that point.
Entirely taking out Ukrainian grain shipments is not a small sliver of the total amount of long-distance grain shipping, but instead requires a significant increase in the total deadweight-ton-miles. We are talking about taking 10%+ of international wheat/corn/barley trade and making it travel 3–6x further than it otherwise would, in an industry that usually runs on thin capacity margins. (Disclaimer: I am not an expert and have not done a detailed calculation.)
That is a potential logistical nightmare. Hopefully smart people with the power to make large temporary changes are working on ameliorating the pain and keeping everyone fed.
Of who? Don't the farmers who grew extra wheat want to sell it? Or are you talking about governments preventing wheat exports (I know that has happened in the past).
> removing subsidies for farmers
Not sure how that is germane. What do you mean?
> logistics of actually shipping wheat
That's a great point! Shipping from the Black Sea ports to Egypt/other ME nations is surely cheaper than sending wheat from India/Aus/USA to those areas.
> climate change, etc.
Sure, that's a threat to wheat (and food in general) everywhere and will be for decades. Do you see it as particularly acute/relevant to the current situation? I don't.
What am I missing?