The Summer of Starvation

 We have commented that here in America, no one will starve to death in the next year.  We have enough wealth to continue to buy $8 box of Wheaties.  But in other nations around the world where they live on $5 per day, doubling their food prices will lead to starvation.  It would seem that planet earth is experiencing a perfect storm of “things going wrong”.   There will be famines and earthquakes in various places.

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There is another problem: there just may not be enough actual fertilizer coming out of Russia, which has decided to punish the world by sending food prices for Western nations to record highs and spark social unrest in the process.  After all, the biggest reason prices are so high is because there is just not enough supply. And while speculators may have pushed prices somewhat higher than they should be, any farmers hoping that prices will fully renormalize will be disappointed.

Which leaves us with “demand destruction”; only as Rabobank’s Michael Every reminds us, when it comes to food “demand destruction” – especially at poor, third-world countries – it has a different, less pleasant name: starvation.

Consider what is going on in Chad: as DW reports, Africa’s fifth-largest country declared a food emergency due to a lack of grain supplies. The landlocked African nation on Thursday urged the international community to help its population cope with rising food insecurity.

Cereal prices across Africa surged because of the slump in exports from Ukraine — a consequence of the war in Ukraine and a raft of international sanctions on Russia which have disrupted supplies of fertilizer, wheat and other commodities from both Russia and Ukraine.

DW spoke with one couple in Chad who are dealing with the effects of collapsing food supplies:

Cedric Toralta and Anne Non-Assoum live in the Boutalbagar neighborhood of Chad’s capital, N’Djamena. Non-Assoum — who had just returned from the market — expressed her dissatisfaction with rising food prices.

”Look what I bought: Here is meat for 1,500 CFA francs ($2.45, €2.28), rice for 1,000 and spices for 600 — that’s more than 3,000 CFA francs only for lunch for four people,” she said.

https://www.activistpost.com/2022/06/the-summer-of-starvation-soaring-fertilizer-prices-unleash-chaos-hunger-worldwide.html