![]() ![]() If it wasn't for a solid harvest in North America and the fact that Russian crops are still unaffected by international sanctions, the situation would be grimmer than it already is. Prices for spring red wheat in Chicago already hit a 14-year high in March, and are making a fresh play for a record. China, the world's biggest producer and consumer of wheat, has been aggressively building up its own stockpiles as its relations with food-exporting nations fray. The world had been counting on Indian grain after the war in Ukraine, drought in Argentina and floods in Australia cut production from those countries. India last week said it would restrict exports of wheat to manage its own food security after a punishing pre-monsoon heatwave damaged the winter harvest. That's the situation the world is in at present. Throw politics into the mix, and the margin of safety gets even narrower. If freak weather conditions knock out two at once, we're more dependent on the others, plus stocks from previous years, to keep ourselves fed. For all the sophistication of the global trade in calories, we're still overwhelmingly dependent on half-a-dozen breadbaskets to feed ourselves - the US Midwest, South America, western Europe, the former Soviet Union, the Indo-Gangetic plain, and eastern China. ![]() This may have lulled us into a false sense of security. So long as food-dependent nations have the foreign exchange to pay for imported nutrition, those effects should cancel each other out and avert hunger. ![]() During the converse El Nino cycle, wheat production falls in Australia and the US, but increases in Russia and China, while rice does better in Bengal and Indonesia but worse in China and mainland Southeast Asia. The La Nina climate cycle tends to reduce soybean and corn yields in the Americas, but increase them in Asia. Thanks to the way major climate cycles shift rainfall from continent to continent, it's common for crop failures in one region to be paired with bumper harvests elsewhere in the world. That's added an important safety net to the world's food systems. About a quarter of all the calories we consume are now traded across borders. The 70% fall in ocean freight costs between 18 changed this, sparking the growth of a global trade in grains. In past centuries, crop failures in one region would inevitably lead to starvation. How has the world managed to double its population over the past 50 years while still keeping most of us fed? Much of it is down to globalization. ![]()
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