Food would be plentiful and inexpensive if we grew crops for humans instead of for animals. Animal agriculture is food production in reverse: 50% to 90% of the food value/calories is lost by feeding it to animals. Animal agriculture may be the most wasteful thing in the world.
In re Russian use of broad gauge, my railfan father many years ago told me that Russia had adopted it because of how common soft, marshy soil is in the main areas early Russian rail lines were built and designers wanting to spread out a train's weight over a greater area, but maybe that's wrong!
Can someone help me understand how Turkey can simultaneously be the #10 exporter and #4 importer of wheat? Are there certain types of wheat that there's not domestic demand for that they export and other types with a lot of domestic demand that they can't produce in-country and have to import?
Also, Russia hasn't blocked its own grain exports. Kicking Russia off of SWIFT made it more difficult for third countries to pay Russia for stuff, which was sort of the intended effect but is resulting in collateral damage. The African Union itself is saying that. https://www.ft.com/content/e558de33-6064-4b10-a784-eb344cb17915
So I think there might be options here other than "try to sink a nuclear armed Great Power's most important fleet and hope that that doesn't massively escalate the conflict"?
I've been on trains between Ukraine and Poland and the gauge problem is dealt with at the border by lifting the cars and replacing the wheels underneath with the appropriate gauge for the country you are entering. It takes an hour or so. I must believe there is a similar ability for freight.
I also noticed that Turkey is a big wheat importer with a BIG inflation problem. Even without messing with the Montreux convention, Turkey (with Bulgaria, Romania, and even, Georgia) could organize convoys for protecting Ukrainian grain shipments. Iran and Saudi Arabia are also big wheat importers that might sweeten the deal by increasing oil exports (Iran needing some sanctions forbearance).
MattY mentions in passing that a lot of grain (corn, soybeans) is used to feed livestock. Eating grain-fed livestock is horrendously inefficient - you need approx. 1000 kcal of corn to produce 100 kcal of beef.
Wouldn't it be great if Americans cut back on their meat (especially beef) consumption and freed some of the corn and soy to be fed directly to hungry people in poorer countries? I'm thinking of those old posters from WWII, admonishing American civilians to reduce their consumption of various goods to make sure there's enough for the soldiers on the front lines. Could something similar work today? I know I'm probably being wildly optimistic, but I just wanted to put it out there.
Disclaimer: I understand that crops that are fed to animals are not "food grade," but does this mean "literally not fit for human consumption" or "somewhat less tasty than human-grade crops"? Because if it's the latter, and the choice for poor people is a) eat substandard grains or b) starve to death, then I'm pretty sure most people would pick option a.
I hope among the Slow Boring commentariat there are some smart people who can educate the rest of us on agricultural economics and government policy regarding it.
I get it that fertilizer prices are a lot higher, and that may drive reduced plantings, and that corn prices have gone up as well (though not as much as wheat prices). Still, it seems the government could actually be doing things here, like not raising the idiotic ethanol requirements and working to end the now-stupid tariffs on Moroccan phosphate exports (https://www.greatamericancrop.com/news-resources/article/2022/03/18/fertilizer-tariffs-questioned).
Tech needs, like most things, to come to the rescue with this. Spend less time thinking about how to terraform Mars, and a bit more in how to terraform Egypt into being more fertile outside the Nile Valley, so we don't have as many of these single points of failure in supply chains.
Of course, like others have noted, the whole "oh, no... GMO" thing should die in a fire. Without GMO crops, the shortages we see now would be child's play.
We know what to do. Build a giant nuclear powered desalinization plant/fertilizer plant. As Matt mentioned the other day, the only obstacle is both process are very energy intensive.
I think the sentence below is meant to say, “making *imports* cheaper.’
‘High wheat prices push up the value of the dollar, improve our terms of trade, and have some offsetting disinflationary benefits in terms of making exports cheaper.’
I feel like the stats and graphs about imports need to be contextualized by relating them to total consumption. Is Egypt's 11 million metric tons of imports 5% of their consumption or 50% or 90%?
It seems to me Russia threatening the global food supply is perfectly strategic within the "International community vs. Pariah state" paradigm pretty much all of the West has tacitly or explicitly promulgated, no?
Matt distinguishes in this post between "Russia's enemies" and "The countries hurt by their actions," and that makes a lot of sense on one level, since Egypt and Indonesia don't have control over the sanctions. But insofar as almost every country (except a handful, say China and Iran and North Korea, etc.) is in some meaningful sense part of the "International community" from which Russia is pretty ostracized now, I think that distinction collapses. If I'm Russia, I see pretty much all the major players saying "International community, condemn Russia and support Ukraine! It's all of us against them, the bad guys!" Which means hurting pretty much any country is the same, and there are almost no costs to inflicting damage on "innocent" countries (since you're already a pariah state, so who gives a fuck about more international condemnation).
Accordingly, threatening the food supply of random countries also seems like a wise move from Russia's end in that it puts pressure on the key players who *do* have control over the sanctions, since letting innocent countries starve as a result of their proxy war is not a good look in the "International community" paradigm. Clearly it's Russia's fault, in a meaningful sense; but here we are reading an article about how it's shitty that these countries are collateral damage, and it's not hard to view the sanctioners as responsible for fixing this terrible negative externality.
Maybe I'm missing something about Russia's perspective on this, since I'm often surprised by what it turns out Putin seems to be thinking. And I take Matt to mostly be saying "This is shitty" rather than "Why is Russia doing this?" But it seems worth explicitly naming the strategic reality at play, and I didn't get that from this piece.
I think your assuming the "international community at large" is more cohesive than it really is. The vast majority of countries don't get involved in external conflicts regardless of who is right or wrong. They are too busy just trying to survive. If what Russia is doing makes it harder to survive, I would think this would gain them enmity they wouldn't otherwise have from this conflict.
Does anyone have a good take on ethanol? I know a huge part of the US's corn production goes into ethanol (40%?) and I've heard people make the argument that that not good for some reason.
Would reducing subsidies/requirements for ethanol put more corn into the feed/food supply and reduce food costs? Would this increase gasoline prices so much that it wouldn't be worth it? Maybe this just isn't possible on short timeline for logistical reasons?
I haven't thought about ethanol in...years, but the reason it used to be considered not good is that it is essentially a boondoggle designed to funnel money to farmers that offers no environmental benefits. Also, if I remember correctly, the corn used for ethanol isn't the variety we eat...
A navel war is the best strategy option? The U.S. cutting off support to Ukraine will lead to a peace treaty in a week. Why does the U.S. care what the terms are. We are directly making this more painful to the world with no strategic objective.
"The U.S. cutting off support to Ukraine will lead to a peace treaty in a week."
Source for that?
If I recall correctly, the first US weapons reached Ukraine under Trump, even though the war started in 2014 and Trump didn't take office until 2017.
Even if you ignore all hostilities before February 2022, the large-scale weapons supply didn't magically reach the Ukrainians immediately after the invasion. It took much more than a week for large shipments to arrive and in this time the Russian Armed Forces were stuck outside of Kyiv. Given the total inability of the Russians to defeat the Ukrainians during all this time, it seems to me that the fastest way to end the war is to actually arm the more competent army, i.e., the Ukrainians.
Moreover, Ukraine is closer to the EU than Syria, and has a much larger population. How do we know that Russia winning here won't cause a huge refugee crisis that will end the EU? Ending the EU sounds destabilizing to me.
Zelenskyy took office in 2019 and Biden took office in 2021. I'm not sure what type of profit you refer to, but both of these events happened many many weeks after 2014, so I don't think that your timeline makes sense.
What if it didn't? What if the Ukrainians continued to fight, but just sacrificed a lot more people in a guerilla war instead of being able to fight a more conventional war? Would you be thrilled that the US wasn't involved, or would you recognize that its not the US causing the Ukrainians to fight, they are choosing to do so on their own?
We have no strategic interest in weakening the second largest threat to the US led international order? We don't have an interest in reinforcing the international norm that acquisition by conquest is illegitimate? For what amounts to relatively small amounts of money to the US (If we spend 100 billion on this, it will be less than .5% of our annual GDP).
Do you also wish the French had stayed out of the Revolutionary War and we were still King George's "sweet, submissive subject?"
If the US government is interested in reinforcing an international norm against acquisition by conquest, then perhaps it should stop occupying Syria's oil fields (they might even be able to get some concessions from Russia in exchange for that), stop subsidizing Israel's West Bank settlements, and take back its recognition of Morocco's annexation of Western Sahara and Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights. And maybe also stop trying to get the world to recognize as an independent state the patch of Serbian territory that NATO occupies because it bombed Belgrade without authorization from the UNSC 23 years ago on behalf of a separatist movement, (Kosovo, of course) because if that's legitimate what arguments are there, exactly, against the legitimacy of Russia's recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics as independent states?
“Do you also wish the French had stayed out of the Revolutionary War and we were still King George's "sweet, submissive subject?"
Well…now that you brought it up…. If the colonists lose then slavery is abolished in 1833 and there is no civil war and America ends up essentially the way it currently is just with Canada/Australia’s political system.
I'm much less convinced of this. If the US had been a part of the UK, then its more likely that there would have been significantly stronger economic interest in the UK in keeping it legal. I think its just as likely if not more that the UK delays abolishing it.
The strategic objective is to prevent Putin from moving back into his office in Berlin. And to make the Chinese aware that invading Taiwan might very well be a debacle of such magnitude that it spells the end of the CCP.
Apparently some deals can get made even during a war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_Grain_Initiative
Isn't the most likely thing for China to do with the huge grain stockpile to simply eat it themselves since China is a big cereal importer?
Food would be plentiful and inexpensive if we grew crops for humans instead of for animals. Animal agriculture is food production in reverse: 50% to 90% of the food value/calories is lost by feeding it to animals. Animal agriculture may be the most wasteful thing in the world.
In re Russian use of broad gauge, my railfan father many years ago told me that Russia had adopted it because of how common soft, marshy soil is in the main areas early Russian rail lines were built and designers wanting to spread out a train's weight over a greater area, but maybe that's wrong!
Can someone help me understand how Turkey can simultaneously be the #10 exporter and #4 importer of wheat? Are there certain types of wheat that there's not domestic demand for that they export and other types with a lot of domestic demand that they can't produce in-country and have to import?
Why not start by eliminating the ethanol mandate. People will starve while we burn corn for a very poor fuel
Turkey and Russia have worked out a tentative deal, right now, to open up a naval grain corridor in the Black Sea. They need Ukraine's cooperation for this because Ukraine mined Odessa's port. Maybe we could just encourage Ukraine to take that deal? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-06/ukraine-cautious-as-turkey-russia-push-black-sea-grain-deal#xj4y7vzkg
Also, Russia hasn't blocked its own grain exports. Kicking Russia off of SWIFT made it more difficult for third countries to pay Russia for stuff, which was sort of the intended effect but is resulting in collateral damage. The African Union itself is saying that. https://www.ft.com/content/e558de33-6064-4b10-a784-eb344cb17915
So I think there might be options here other than "try to sink a nuclear armed Great Power's most important fleet and hope that that doesn't massively escalate the conflict"?
I've been on trains between Ukraine and Poland and the gauge problem is dealt with at the border by lifting the cars and replacing the wheels underneath with the appropriate gauge for the country you are entering. It takes an hour or so. I must believe there is a similar ability for freight.
I also noticed that Turkey is a big wheat importer with a BIG inflation problem. Even without messing with the Montreux convention, Turkey (with Bulgaria, Romania, and even, Georgia) could organize convoys for protecting Ukrainian grain shipments. Iran and Saudi Arabia are also big wheat importers that might sweeten the deal by increasing oil exports (Iran needing some sanctions forbearance).
MattY mentions in passing that a lot of grain (corn, soybeans) is used to feed livestock. Eating grain-fed livestock is horrendously inefficient - you need approx. 1000 kcal of corn to produce 100 kcal of beef.
Wouldn't it be great if Americans cut back on their meat (especially beef) consumption and freed some of the corn and soy to be fed directly to hungry people in poorer countries? I'm thinking of those old posters from WWII, admonishing American civilians to reduce their consumption of various goods to make sure there's enough for the soldiers on the front lines. Could something similar work today? I know I'm probably being wildly optimistic, but I just wanted to put it out there.
Disclaimer: I understand that crops that are fed to animals are not "food grade," but does this mean "literally not fit for human consumption" or "somewhat less tasty than human-grade crops"? Because if it's the latter, and the choice for poor people is a) eat substandard grains or b) starve to death, then I'm pretty sure most people would pick option a.
I hope among the Slow Boring commentariat there are some smart people who can educate the rest of us on agricultural economics and government policy regarding it.
Wheat prices are way up and poorer countries are facing crushing economic burdens. Meanwhile, the US is reducing its amount of spring wheat planting (https://www.agriculture.com/markets/newswire/update-1-us-farmers-plan-to-cut-corn-wheat-plantings-despite-strong-demand). There's every reason to switch from corn to wheat (spring corn plantings are eight times greater then wheat -- though most wheat is planted in the fall), and yet the EPA has just released policy that is *raising* the amount of corn-based ethanol that has to be blended with gasoline (https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2022-06-03/epa-raises-amount-of-ethanol-that-must-be-blended-with-gas).
I get it that fertilizer prices are a lot higher, and that may drive reduced plantings, and that corn prices have gone up as well (though not as much as wheat prices). Still, it seems the government could actually be doing things here, like not raising the idiotic ethanol requirements and working to end the now-stupid tariffs on Moroccan phosphate exports (https://www.greatamericancrop.com/news-resources/article/2022/03/18/fertilizer-tariffs-questioned).
Tech needs, like most things, to come to the rescue with this. Spend less time thinking about how to terraform Mars, and a bit more in how to terraform Egypt into being more fertile outside the Nile Valley, so we don't have as many of these single points of failure in supply chains.
Of course, like others have noted, the whole "oh, no... GMO" thing should die in a fire. Without GMO crops, the shortages we see now would be child's play.
We know what to do. Build a giant nuclear powered desalinization plant/fertilizer plant. As Matt mentioned the other day, the only obstacle is both process are very energy intensive.
I think the sentence below is meant to say, “making *imports* cheaper.’
‘High wheat prices push up the value of the dollar, improve our terms of trade, and have some offsetting disinflationary benefits in terms of making exports cheaper.’
I feel like the stats and graphs about imports need to be contextualized by relating them to total consumption. Is Egypt's 11 million metric tons of imports 5% of their consumption or 50% or 90%?
Really interesting piece!
It seems to me Russia threatening the global food supply is perfectly strategic within the "International community vs. Pariah state" paradigm pretty much all of the West has tacitly or explicitly promulgated, no?
Matt distinguishes in this post between "Russia's enemies" and "The countries hurt by their actions," and that makes a lot of sense on one level, since Egypt and Indonesia don't have control over the sanctions. But insofar as almost every country (except a handful, say China and Iran and North Korea, etc.) is in some meaningful sense part of the "International community" from which Russia is pretty ostracized now, I think that distinction collapses. If I'm Russia, I see pretty much all the major players saying "International community, condemn Russia and support Ukraine! It's all of us against them, the bad guys!" Which means hurting pretty much any country is the same, and there are almost no costs to inflicting damage on "innocent" countries (since you're already a pariah state, so who gives a fuck about more international condemnation).
Accordingly, threatening the food supply of random countries also seems like a wise move from Russia's end in that it puts pressure on the key players who *do* have control over the sanctions, since letting innocent countries starve as a result of their proxy war is not a good look in the "International community" paradigm. Clearly it's Russia's fault, in a meaningful sense; but here we are reading an article about how it's shitty that these countries are collateral damage, and it's not hard to view the sanctioners as responsible for fixing this terrible negative externality.
Maybe I'm missing something about Russia's perspective on this, since I'm often surprised by what it turns out Putin seems to be thinking. And I take Matt to mostly be saying "This is shitty" rather than "Why is Russia doing this?" But it seems worth explicitly naming the strategic reality at play, and I didn't get that from this piece.
I think your assuming the "international community at large" is more cohesive than it really is. The vast majority of countries don't get involved in external conflicts regardless of who is right or wrong. They are too busy just trying to survive. If what Russia is doing makes it harder to survive, I would think this would gain them enmity they wouldn't otherwise have from this conflict.
It's basically hostage-taking, is what I'm getting from this.
Does anyone have a good take on ethanol? I know a huge part of the US's corn production goes into ethanol (40%?) and I've heard people make the argument that that not good for some reason.
Would reducing subsidies/requirements for ethanol put more corn into the feed/food supply and reduce food costs? Would this increase gasoline prices so much that it wouldn't be worth it? Maybe this just isn't possible on short timeline for logistical reasons?
I haven't thought about ethanol in...years, but the reason it used to be considered not good is that it is essentially a boondoggle designed to funnel money to farmers that offers no environmental benefits. Also, if I remember correctly, the corn used for ethanol isn't the variety we eat...
IIRC, it can be used for animal food.
A navel war is the best strategy option? The U.S. cutting off support to Ukraine will lead to a peace treaty in a week. Why does the U.S. care what the terms are. We are directly making this more painful to the world with no strategic objective.
What's so bad about a "navel war" we see them on Twitter every day.
"The U.S. cutting off support to Ukraine will lead to a peace treaty in a week."
Source for that?
If I recall correctly, the first US weapons reached Ukraine under Trump, even though the war started in 2014 and Trump didn't take office until 2017.
Even if you ignore all hostilities before February 2022, the large-scale weapons supply didn't magically reach the Ukrainians immediately after the invasion. It took much more than a week for large shipments to arrive and in this time the Russian Armed Forces were stuck outside of Kyiv. Given the total inability of the Russians to defeat the Ukrainians during all this time, it seems to me that the fastest way to end the war is to actually arm the more competent army, i.e., the Ukrainians.
Moreover, Ukraine is closer to the EU than Syria, and has a much larger population. How do we know that Russia winning here won't cause a huge refugee crisis that will end the EU? Ending the EU sounds destabilizing to me.
No more way to profit for Zelensky so what would be the point. That there would be no more money for Biden is why it won't happen.
Oh you’re a nut. Glad that came out before I went down this rabbit hole.
Zelenskyy took office in 2019 and Biden took office in 2021. I'm not sure what type of profit you refer to, but both of these events happened many many weeks after 2014, so I don't think that your timeline makes sense.
What if it didn't? What if the Ukrainians continued to fight, but just sacrificed a lot more people in a guerilla war instead of being able to fight a more conventional war? Would you be thrilled that the US wasn't involved, or would you recognize that its not the US causing the Ukrainians to fight, they are choosing to do so on their own?
Yes I would be very thrilled. We have no strategic interest.
We have no strategic interest in weakening the second largest threat to the US led international order? We don't have an interest in reinforcing the international norm that acquisition by conquest is illegitimate? For what amounts to relatively small amounts of money to the US (If we spend 100 billion on this, it will be less than .5% of our annual GDP).
Do you also wish the French had stayed out of the Revolutionary War and we were still King George's "sweet, submissive subject?"
If the US government is interested in reinforcing an international norm against acquisition by conquest, then perhaps it should stop occupying Syria's oil fields (they might even be able to get some concessions from Russia in exchange for that), stop subsidizing Israel's West Bank settlements, and take back its recognition of Morocco's annexation of Western Sahara and Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights. And maybe also stop trying to get the world to recognize as an independent state the patch of Serbian territory that NATO occupies because it bombed Belgrade without authorization from the UNSC 23 years ago on behalf of a separatist movement, (Kosovo, of course) because if that's legitimate what arguments are there, exactly, against the legitimacy of Russia's recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics as independent states?
Just for starters.
“Do you also wish the French had stayed out of the Revolutionary War and we were still King George's "sweet, submissive subject?"
Well…now that you brought it up…. If the colonists lose then slavery is abolished in 1833 and there is no civil war and America ends up essentially the way it currently is just with Canada/Australia’s political system.
I'm much less convinced of this. If the US had been a part of the UK, then its more likely that there would have been significantly stronger economic interest in the UK in keeping it legal. I think its just as likely if not more that the UK delays abolishing it.
Also - there is a really good chance that North America turns into a bunch of countries at some point and has conflicts closer to what Europe has had.
The strategic objective is to prevent Putin from moving back into his office in Berlin. And to make the Chinese aware that invading Taiwan might very well be a debacle of such magnitude that it spells the end of the CCP.
Putin running Berlin happened decades ago when Merkel outsourced Germany's energy to Russia. She was just keeping the seat warm for him.
Um no. Putin wants to literally rule over his former domains.
This is a bit of a reach