Missing wheat from the war is less than 1% of global wheat crop

Re:Missing wheat from the war is less than 1% of global whea... by ineedasername on Thursday March 31, 2022 @04:25PM (#30871831)

Keep in mind that grains are not only used for human consumption though. It's also used for animals. Egypt has 10M cattle alone [1] and a 1,000lb animal needs roughly 7x the calories as a person. [2] So that same largest cargo ship will only feed about ~200,000 cattle, requiring 50 such ships to feed the cattle population.

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...

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Re:Missing wheat from the war is less than 1% of global whea... by pixl97 on Thursday March 31, 2022 @07:16PM (#30873335)

I mean, that is just an advertisement to reduce meat production and focus on starch based calories for humans rather than supplying to inefficient meat production.

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Re:Missing wheat from the war is less than 1% of global whea... by ineedasername on Thursday March 31, 2022 @08:55PM (#30874049)

I was thinking much the same as I wrote it, but didn't want to overburden an already long comment. Here though, I'll say that large cattle consume about 30 calories for each single calorie their meat will provide. Poultry seem more like 10 to 1.

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)

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