by John Hirschauer
As a twenty-something living in Washington, you have to find ways to cut costs. A lot of people here go without cable. Others sell their cars and rely on public transport. I like television and the open road, so I gave up food instead.
I eat the same thing every week. It’s a joke around the office. On Saturday, I’ll buy chicken breasts, ground turkey, sweet potatoes, asparagus, protein bars, eggs, and wheat bread at the supermarket. If I play my cards right, I can walk out of the store having paid less than $60. For five days’ worth of food, that’s not bad. I cook some of it Sunday and the rest on Wednesday night. I hate it, but it’s been pretty good on my waistline.
Even on the Club Fed diet, I’m feeling the pinch of rising food prices. Bread has become more expensive in the past three months. Eggs have, too. Buying store-brand chicken is like buying Ibérico ham.
I’ll survive. I can always cut cable. For wannabe proles in the laptop class, the rise in food prices has been at most an inconvenience. But the outbreak of war in Ukraine and the coming disruptions in global food markets will immiserate the actual working class in this country and may kill thousands of the world’s poor.
Well before war broke out in Ukraine, prices in the food industry were surging. U.S. food prices rose a whopping 7.5 percent between 2021 and 2022. Indexed global food prices hit an all-time high last month.
The causes are familiar. Supply-chain disruptions have slowed production and slashed supply. The sight of barren grocery shelves has incentivized consumers to buy in bulk, sending aggregate demand skyward. Labor-retention issues and slumping workforce participation rates have reduced output and further cut supply. Labor issues have reached a point where meatpacking companies like Tyson plan to automate their processing plants to weather labor shortages.
At the same time, the prices of industry inputs like oil, animal feed, and fertilizer have soared. The price of urea—a popular, highly soluble nitrogen-based fertilizer—nearly doubled at the pivotal New Orleans port last year. In input-dependent industries like agriculture, where producers net only 15 percent of final retail cost, consumers inevitably bear most of the increase in input costs.
The effects of the war in Ukraine and the sanctions imposed against the Russian government and economy threaten to accelerate these trends. Russia is the world’s leading producer of wheat; Ukraine is fifth. Together, they are responsible for some 30 percent of the world’s wheat exports. War will almost certainly disrupt planting season in both Russia and Ukraine.
Like most agricultural commodities, the price of wheat tends to move with the price of oil. The continued rise of crude oil prices, combined with the loss of Russian and Ukrainian wheat exports, will accelerate the rise in global wheat prices. That’s consequential domestically—paying $5.50 for a loaf of bread is no small thing—but abroad, it could be lethal. Wheat is responsible for some 20 percent of the world’s caloric intake. Nigeria, where 40 percent of people live below the global poverty line, is one of the world’s ten leading importers of wheat. What happens when they can’t afford to import grain?
More concerning is the possibility of a global shortage of nitrogen-based fertilizers, which would dwarf the impact of rising wheat prices. Without nitrogen-based fertilizers, half of the world’s population simply could not be fed. Russia is responsible for roughly two-thirds of the world’s ammonium nitrate production. To support domestic farmers and protect its fragile food supply, Russia banned all ammonium nitrate exports until April. Depending on developments in Ukraine, the Kremlin could extend the export ban in the future.
The West already sanctioned Belaruskali, the world’s second largest potash producer, in 2021, which caused fertilizer prices to soar. Losing Russian exports could drive global fertilizer prices—and, inevitably, food prices—through the roof. Many smallholder farmers will be unable to afford rising fertilizer costs, entrenching the power of large industrial farmers and cutting smaller communities off from a key source of food stability.
We are on the precipice of some very dark days ahead. This might be the 1930’s all over again but far more devastating.
And like the Democrats trying to blame the ongoing rise in costs on Putin, they will blame disaster after disaster on the results of idiot Biden’s polices, not the idiot policies themselves.
Biden is telling the truth, even though telling it makes him vulnerable to this sort of bullshit.
Russia, Russia, Russia…
Tired and worn out
Many people don’t seem to understand who it is that Putin is attacking. He’s attacking all of us. He’s disrupting the economies of the entire free world. His intentions go far beyond Ukraine. Either he’s stopped now, or he won’t be stopped at all. This is the free world’s one opportunity. Either we make the war in Ukraine a total disaster for Putin, or Putin will pull the entire world into war.
Putin is attacking the NWO that is in his backyard. This war began in 2014 with the Obama coup.
This occurred because totalitarian Leftists at the command of their globalist masters released a pandemic to shift the world-order….and STILL had to rig the American election to stop Trump from stopping them.
OWN IT, BITCH.
There is no we. YOU are part of a splinter nation that broke free of the United States of America…or you are a foreign agent for the NWO.
You do not speak for us or represent an American point of view.
Novus ordo seclorum. It’s written on the back of every US dollar bill. It’s not about leftism, it’s about liberal values—ideals that the nation was founded on.
What America stands for is the polar opposite of what Vladimir Putin is doing. Anyone who sees clearly can see that. Consequently, what Putin is trying to do is being actively resisted. To do otherwise would be fundamentally unAmerican—part of some lesser “value” system.
More costly gas is not an honorable argument against resistance to Putin’s aggression. More costly gas is only a practical consideration. It’s part of the problem that needs to be worked through. We’ve sacrificed more important things for our honor and values in the past than that. You know that as well as I do.
This is a ridiculous, and easily dismissed statement on the events in Ukraine.
The US-led coup in 2014 has a bit to do with our current situation (we said who COULD and COULD NOT be in the new regime), and also the IMF fighting with Moscow over financial interests to be exploited.
The powers that be, and you, do not give a damn about the lives being lost in Ukraine. You care about money.
Either you work for the West, either FBI, IMF, or EU disinformation network, or you are just an asshole quisling who has no idea what they are saying.
The information war to cover what’s ACTUALLY going on in Ukraine has failed. Perhaps you should take a vacation.
Trump represents the will of American interests. Biden is merely an extension of a European-ruled West playing god and now getting people killed.
Once we get the filth of the bought Democrats and GOP out, we can look at cutting the purse strings from the EU.
All I have to do is check any of the world’s many reality-focused news sources to see what is going on in Ukraine.
They have nothing to do with reality. these are not new sources but merely propaganda outlets that are covering for various regimes.
you might as well be working for a Russian news outlet
you are the same thing
If you want me to educate you on what’s really going on in the Ukraine, immigration just ask.
Make sure you oink for me first, propaganda pig
03/09/22 – Ukraine says Russia bombed children’s hospital in besieged Mariupol
Who cares? The blood of those children is enough to be spread from Putin’s hands to Bidens, and many, many other in both the East and West.
I think you might need to reexamine a few things.
I’ve examined many things.
You’re just spreading disinformation and propaganda like f*cking pig.
Your syntax is slipping, Ivan.
Oink, bitch
….or Klaus
Hunter Biden Still Listed as Part Owner of Chinese Firm Despite Divestment Claim
Your propaganda narrative is slipping too. Quick! Double-down with some toddler-level platitude like you do.
This is totally the fault of obama/biden/Ron klaxons and Valerie Jarrett
You can see even more clearly how much Trump threatened the financial interests of many Democrats, Republicans, and globalists in the EU
More Ukraine propaganda. Zelensky is a puppet of the EU/NATO and the globalists.
It’s a very complex issue for sure
4.3 Million Americans Quit Their Jobs in January
i imagine this too will be blamed on Putin.
biden is lying. He would lie to his own dead son.
FJB
There is plenty he can do.
This will be the stake in the heart of the vampire Democrat socialist green weenie child grooming pedophile enabling open border anti American war mongering party.
Its been hard for the non mega farms to survive for years, every year Wisconsin loses small family farms in large numbers. Crumbling barns, abandoned houses now dot the sides of the highways. The land is sucked up by mega farms with a barn that covers a full acre and huge long piles of manure covered with tarp material topped with tire halves to hold it down. Those barns are lit up during the winter to keep up milk production. Now the mega farms will be in danger or 10 bucks for a gallon of milk, the farm wont see much of that, its the mega bottlers those that homoginize and pasturize stick it in plastic jugs, they have always got the most profit.
I get my milk from a real dairy, the milk is put in glass bottles, with a deposit of 2 bucks per bottle. They buy from triple grade A local farms that use no hormones. This dairy also sells to local grocery stores, its also family owned.
There are only 2 of these left in this area all the smaller ones are long gone, along with the smaller grocery stores they used to sell to.
What we have has long been going on and getting worse at an accelerated rate. Dont expect to find the tropical fruits and fresh vegetables that we have taken for granted.
Plant a garden, learn to preserve, network with those that do the same. Back in the day it was called a liberty garden. We are about to learn why grandma saved her aluminum foil.
As Ebenezer said, “The better to reduce the surplus population.”, eh idiot Joe and the rest of your elitist liberal friends? Just like another Uncle Joe of yesteryear, just get rid of the unwanted by starving them to death.
In January 2021, Bill Gates became the largest owner of farmland in America, now owning over 269,000 acres of farmland.
It’s not part of his plans to save the planet. It’s a hedging strategy,” said Daniel Bigelow, a professor of agricultural economics at Montana State University. In other words, when the economy is struggling, the value of farmland generally doesn’t depreciate.
Bill Gates was an early investor in fake-meat companies like Impossible Foods, which relies on genetically modified soybeans, and also Beyond Meat.
Soybean roots are the main ingredient of such things and it has been turning men into soyboys at an accelerated rate.
Joe Rogan even made a remark about how Bill Gates, himself, has sprouted manbreasts, a potbelly and yet kept his thin arms and legs.
Meanwhile real farmers who work “his” land are being treated like serfs of old.
They get little-to-no acreage to grow their own foods, just must follow orders and grow his soy and MickeyD’s potatoes.
95 food plants damaged under Biden, is this normal?
Here is the Updated List of US-Based Food Manufacturing Plants Destroyed Under Biden Administration
Should there not be some type of investigation into this, perhaps Congressionally related?
Unless someone besides the corrupt Democrats are in charge, it would just turn into something targeting Trump.
January 2023 with a new Congress IMHO an investigation into this is warranted.
Oh, investigation is more than warranted. But unless someone with a desire to find facts and develop solutions instead of salving a visceral fear of Orange Man, it’s pointless.
Just another way for the left to get rid of more “human weeds”.