[husainfazel]

What you're missing is that the global food system is under attack by bad actors.

1. The US Treasury drew up the list of economic sanctions against Russia and Belarus. Then they pressured the compliant EU to follow. The sanctions no surprises had a predictable impact on global grain/fertilizer and energy supply prices. The US basically sanctioned themselves and the global economy.

2. Meanwhile China was hit by terrible flooding last year and faces record low yields for crops so they are now desperately converting baseball courts and roads because their farmers can't get seeds and fertilizers. Do you know why? Because they're stuck on cargo ships sitting off the coast of Shanghai which has been locked down under the bizarre "Zero Covid" quarantine. This is conveniently being done during planting season when they're already facing a huge shortfall. End result - they are importing more and increasing the global grain/food price further.

3. Whilst China gets hit by flooding, the reverse weather pattern (La Nina) is causing droughts in places like Argentina and Paraguay which produces the majority of the food in South America. So thanks again to our sanctions against Belarus and Russia, we can't get fertilizer to those countries. Similarly 35 African countries get food from Russia/Ukraine and 22 of them get fertilizer from there so the end result is famine in S America and Africa.

4. In Europe, the EU's "Green Agenda" deal means the Italian government can't provide more state aid to the farmers. In Germany, they want to phase out agriculture because of greenhouse gas emissions so they've stopped farmers who want to grow more food. At the same time, the sanctions are making covid-induced food shortages dramatically worse.

So you have well timed global food disasters which are amplified by our sanctions whilst back home:

a) "On Friday, April 8, 2022, Union Pacific informed CF Industries without advance notice that it was mandating certain shippers to reduce the volume of private cars on its railroad effective immediately. The timing of this action by Union Pacific could not come at a worse time for farmers. Not only will fertilizer be delayed by these shipping restrictions, but additional fertilizer needed to complete spring applications may be unable to reach farmers at all. By placing this arbitrary restriction on just a handful of shippers, Union Pacific is jeopardizing farmers’ harvests and increasing the cost of food for consumers."

Not only are they preventing urea and UAN from getting to farmers during the crucial planting season but they're also stopping DEF (Diesel Exhaust Fluid). DEF is used to control emissions in diesel trucks, without it engines can't run. So they're ensuring a complete shutdown of the supply chains across the United States at the same time.

b) "EPA will allow a 50% increase in corn-based biodiesel and ethanol fuel mix for the summer"

Before Covid even began, we had the "Renewable Fuel Standards Act" which mandates annually RISING targets for the production of corn for ethanol fuel blends. This add major price inflation for food. Now the EPA is mandating another increase in corn ethanol for fuel at the same time as when we have astronomical fertilizer prices due to sanctions we imposed AND we're blocking domestic fertilizers being shipped by rail... that's going to send corn prices through the roof and the government knows this very well.

and I'm not even going to touch on all the poultry that USDA are ordering to be destroyed because of "Bird Flu".

As I said in my other comment, it's not by accident or pure back luck - it's by design.

[ImPostingOnHN]

hi, please don't say "russia/Ukraine", it encourages the false equivalency between an international pariah state engaging in a genocide, and the country the genocide is being perpetrated against

Ukraine is not under sanction, and the only things preventing it from providing more food to the world are russia's genocide against Ukrainians, farmers included, russia's blockade of Ukraine, and russia's theft of Ukrainian grain

indeed, the sanctions of the world against russia and belarus, too, are purely a predictable result of their actions, which they nonetheless choose to perpetrate to this very moment, and thus they bear the entire brunt of the consequences

thanks