> Russia also exported 11% of the world's urea, and 48% of the ammonium nitrate. Russia and Ukraine together export 28% of fertilizers made from nitrogen and phosphorous, as well as potassium, according to Morgan Stanley.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/06/a-fertilizer-shortage-worsen...
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-17/belarus-p...
Here's some perspective on current fertilizer prices: https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/fertilizer-prices-expec...
And how does that happen? Be very specific and quantitative. For example, which land gets planted that isn't planted now. Or, which crop gets replaced. Where do the inputs come from and how is that paid for? (Be sure to include equipment.)
Bloomberg notwithstanding, US farmers are actually fairly technically sophisticated. They're also money driven and competent.
Futures doesn't address any of the "how do they actually do it" issues that I raised.
And endless wars are also government actions.
A million dead in the US was always going to wreck havoc, not even counting the people in hospital. For all we know it would have been much worse without government action.
> And endless wars are also government actions.
That is not very helpful. Countries in the Middle East dependent on grain from Ukraine had absolutely no way of avoiding the war, and yet will bear the consequences. From their point of view, it is an uncontrollable calamity just like COVID.
Nearly 3 million people die every year with or without covid. If your claims were true, we would've been facing supply chains issues for decades already.
The supply chain issues are obviously man-made. The who, what, when, where, why and how is anyone's guess.
> Countries in the Middle East dependent on grain from Ukraine had absolutely no way of avoiding the war,
They should have diversified or had contingencies plan already. What have they been doing since the last crisis 10 years ago? Also, the middle east has some of the wealthiest oil producing countries in the world. Let them figure it out and if not, let them remove their imcompetent leaders.
Now there certainly could be an issue of price and logistics costs in food insecure nations, but I'm not sure the answer is enabling Ukrainian production rather than producing more outside of Ukraine / ensuring countries don't cut off global trade in grains.
Figures from: https://downloads.usda.library.cornell.edu/usda-esmis/files/...
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/export-losses-gi....