I started writing this as a quick, 500 word article, expecting for there to be some key villains at the root of it all; however, research kept opening doors, each opening onto to a spider’s web of causes. Hence this, much longer article. To minimise your reading time, I’ve not included references (of which there are many) or direct quotes. Nor have I addressed Covid and lockdowns as separate issues, they are threaded through many of the factors and I hope I’ve woven them in well. If you want, it might be interesting just to examine separately the influence that the virus and the various legislations that resulted from it had on so many facets of the food shortage.
But first, let's get the elephant in the room out of the way immediately. We can blame capitalism and the, not so delicate, balancing act that it is performing as it teeters on the brink of a collapse that is taking us all down with it. There, that has been said.
Let's start at the local supermarket…
Being without food is a scary situation and one that we in developed nations are not used to. Here in one of the richest countries in the world, something along the lines of four million Australians can't afford to eat every day in normal times. Times are tougher now and are looking to become tougher.
I posted this in the #ecotrain community because I saw this community as having the widest range of readers. I often post this kind of thing in #leofinance but the more time I spend there, the less rooted in reality many of those folks seem to be.
You'll also not find any pretty pictures in this post. The situation I write about is complex and dire and pretty pics would distract from the fact that this is a slab of text, full of issues.
It's about 3000 words, so is a longer piece than I've ever written or seen here on Hive. If you intend to read it to the end, I suggest doing it in a couple of goes and take the time to follow up o topics that interest you. All of the info that is here is freely available.
To many folks, here in Australia, as in many other first world countries, food shortages are about their favorite supermarket purchases not being on the shelves, no favourite snacks either. Folks in the developing world are used to far worse than that. Eating certain foods at certain times is so ingrained in us that even though supermarket shelves are full of alternatives, we see only that empty space on the shelf where our favourite food based product used to be.
Breakfast cereals are a classic example of this. There is no reason, beyond marketing, that we need cereals for breakfast. That aspect of the food shortage is really a first world problem, as much of the world eats what they would normally eat during the day. I’m (presently) a first world (do we still use that term?) person and I do love my Oats for breakfast.
One of the biggest causes of issues is the design of the supply chains that bring our shops their stock ‘just in time. 'Just in time' means that retailers replenish their shelves with frequent deliveries from centralised warehouses rather than keep large stocks of items on their inventories.
Head offices also prioritise which branches get stocked in times of shortage, In the first Covid lockdowns, Woolies, one of our local supermarket chains, sent stock from our Gawler branch’s full shelves and coolrooms and shipped them to Melbourne. Smaller, local branches were starved of stock in favour of big city stores and we ran out of pasta, flour and toilet paper. Much of our packaged food comes into SA from Victoria and that flow stopped with the lockdowns.
Warehouse and transport company staff either became sick with Covid or became close contacts and had to isolate, starving suppliers of the staff required to sort and ship their stock. At one stage during the last lockdowns, a certain supermarket giant had 150 out of the usual 500 or so staff off sick at the warehouse nearest to us.
Staff shortages also affected farmers and growers who rely on backpackers to do the work of planting, harvesting and processing that the locals can't or won't do. Because of Covid related travel restrictions, the usual flow of backpackers hasn't occurred, leading to growers planting smaller crops or harvesting less and dumping the rest.
A lot of vegetables are grown locally, especially in nearby Virginia and the Murraylands but much of this is shipped out of state and we bring in a lot of our 'fresh' food from Queensland or even overseas. Heavy rain and flooding on the east coast have caused disruptions to supply chains by preventing stock from being transported by the usual routes. Here, that means a massive hike in the price of some vegetables and, as the year progresses, it will bring a big jump in banana prices too.
Reduced production at the farm level combined with a near doubling of fuel prices has also caused much woe for farmers wanting to get their crops to market. Recent heavy hail storms caused a lot of damage to greenhouses at Angle Vale and Virginia, forcing some growers to stop growing. In the worst cases, affected growers haven't received the money from their insurance claims and some have had to close down their operations.
It's been a difficult time for local farmers and growers.
Internationally
Covid is also having a knock-on effect on international shipping. During the first waves of pandemic and lockdown, people went into an online buying frenzy which resulted in a massive jump in the amount of goods being shipped internationally. That takes shipping containers - many, many shipping containers. The result of this is that shipping containers are hard to come by and there is a huge backlog at most ports and terminals. In some cases, warehouses and shipping companies are running 24 hr a day to handle the backlog. Ports can only process a limited number of cargo ships at a time and many are still waiting off the coast (probably with my last eBay order aboard).
In short, there are fewer containers available for shipping food as electronics and novelties to keep folks distracted in their isolation took priority over a possible food shortage (can't blame folks though, I did exactly that too).
Corn or oil?
There is also the invasion of Ukraine, another likely to happen when China invades Taiwan, and then there's whoever the US is stirring up trouble with as their empire collapses.
The invasion of Ukraine is having interesting effects on the global food supply. That area of the world provides a huge portion of the world's wheat. Naturally, all of the countries involved in and neighbouring the conflict are restricting the amount of wheat and other things that flows out of their country in favour of keeping their own people fed. Much of last season’s wheat for export is being held up in ports in Ukraine, unable to leave because of Russian interference.
Ukraine also provides the biggest share of the world Sunflower oil market, making shortages and price jumps for vegetable oils inevitable in many areas.
Russia's vast supply of natural gas doesn't just fuel cars and power plants, its other key use is to make ammonium based fertilizers as well as fueling vehicles. Much of that fertilizer was previously shipped to South American countries who then grew crops and contributed to over 10% of the globally traded food supply.
The nexus of fuel and food is a fascinating one. Alao worth examining is the connection between corn and oil. The biggest portion of America’s corn crop goes toward making ethanol for fuel, the next biggest chunk is for feeding livestock and the remainder is for human consumption.
The price of oil affects the price of ethanol and therefore the price of corn. The fluctuations in corn production and prices flows on to the food component of the crop. Increasing fuel prices mean increasing demand for and price of ethanol which means increased corn prices. That equals increased prices for corn based foods.
The requirement for more biofuel leads to other food producing farms to switch to much more lucrative corn for their income. More farmland is used for growing corn than anything else.
As mentioned, another huge portion of the corn crop is used for feeding pigs, cows and chickens to satisfy hunger for meat. Recent scares Swine Flu and Avian Influenza highlight how easy it would be for a shortage of any kind of meat to occur.
Military action and the petrodollar
Another aspect of the relation between food and oil is the shift of US international military policy away from outright invasion to a much more horrific use of trade and food sanctions. Rather than direct bombing and blowing up of hard targets, the US is going for the softest of targets in an indirect way - by starving countries of food and energy. This economic warfare kills children and the elderly long before it affects a country’s military. The embargo on Venezuela is an example that is happening right now. The US even pulled a Venezuelan minister off of a flight when it landed in a certain Middle Eastern country. What was he traveling for? To secure deals for food for his people.
Some of these sanctions are related to the international currency of oil, the petrodollar. For decades, there has been an agreement between the US and the Middle East to pay for oil in USD. This has been the default stance of all oil producing countries. Several times, countries have tried to break the tie with the USD and the result has been catastrophic - military invasion or embargo. Libya, and Afghanistan, as two examples , were punished for trying to use a different currency for the sale of their oil. The only state to successfully attempt the shift so far has been Russia and they are too big for the US to punish without a global war. They seem to be succeeding by selling oil for gold or non-US dollar currencies and underwriting their own currency with gold. That shift to a backed currency represents a shift in global financial thinking and a shift back to what was called ‘the gold standard’ and away from the unbacked USD.
Fuel prices affect transport costs, with that rise being shifted onto the price of food with some smaller growers not being able to afford to ship their crops. Covid also negatively affected transportation in developing nations, especially in Africa where trucks were prohibited from moving stock between towns and cities during lockdowns, preventing much of the populus from traveling to local markets either to sell or buy produce. The great distances that need to be covered in Africa, along with the relative poverty of many of its citizens made the situation doubly dangerous.
Tea supplies are suffering too. Sri Lanka was one of the biggest exporters of tea. A little while back, the Sri Lankam government decided that organic was the way to farm and put a national ban on chemical pesticides and fertilizers. There was no time given to farmers for making the transition and a lot of crops suffered losses. Farmers have returned to a chemically enhanced business as usual but the damage has been done and along with other economic mismanagement, the country is sinking fast.
China's situation is interesting. It is the biggest importer of many foodstuffs. While they produce a lot of their own food, the quality and nutritional content is poor due to out of date agricultural practices and policies.. Many Chinese traveling overseas enjoy the difference in quality of fresh fruits and vegetables in the countries that they are traveling in. Also China's appetite for pork is enormous. It will be hard for them to balance agricultural production with the need to feed an ever increasing number of pigs for an ever increasing population.
Climate
The Climate Crisis (global warming, the climate emergency, impending doom - whatever you want to call it) is no longer 'coming', it is here and hammering us right now, throwing us into totally uncharted territory and though we can work with climate and geological analogues through past events, none of those hit anywhere near as quickly and violently (asteroids excepted) as this period of heating.
Humanity has never had it affect our species before either, nor have any of the staple food crops and animals that we have selected and bred into their current forms. Basically, there's nothing alive now that has experienced global warming in their lifetime as a species except for the Earth herself.
At one time, there was the belief that a warming, carbon dioxide and moisture laden atmosphere would be beneficial for growing crops and would even free up land that is in areas that are presently too cold for cropping. We now know that that is not true.
Essentially, land that is presently under snow and ice will turn to swampland as the permafrosts melt. As with many things climate related, thaws are expected to reach a tipping point, then turn the land to slush, releasing billions of tons of methane as they do. Methane is a much more potent store of atmospheric heat than carbon dioxide and this dumping of it will exacerbate conditions greatly.
There is also the (erroneous) expectation that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide will stimulate plant growth and increase crop yields. It is now known that, beside a small flush of green growth, the news isn't that good. Increased CO2 will lead to a slight increase in growth in some varieties of food plants but much will be released from the plant during night time respiration, returning it, unused, to the atmosphere.
Research has also shown that, when grown in high CO2 environments, many of the plant species that we rely on for our food supply contain less nutrition for us to consume. There are some plants that will benefit but most of them use what is called a C4 pathway for using carbon. Unfortunately most of our agricultural crops utilise the C3 pathway.
Nitrogen is also very important in plant growth but there is a maximum level that a plant can use, even when boosted with CO2. This limit is called the 'nitrogen plateau'.
We are seeing high temperatures in India leading to smaller grain size of this year's wheat crop.
In short, the crops that we rely on will not benefit from a warming Earth.
Even the ocean isn't providing the bounties it used to. There is a huge, deep current that carries nutrient rich water up along the coast of Africa and through to northern fishing grounds. Those nutrients feed plankton which, in turn, feed fish. As the ocean warms, the current is weaker bringing less nutrition to the fishing grounds.
As the ocean absorbs carbon dioxide, it becomes more acidic. This means that tiny marine organisms that are the base of the food chain can't grow their shells and structures and die.
Another effect of the warming water is that some species of fish that are rich in omega 3 Fatty acids don't produce as much, meaning that there is less in people's diets. Fatty acids are important for hormone transportation and brain development in our bodies.
Desertification and sea level rise are both eating into the arable land that we have available. Without cutting down huge areas of the forests or draining peat swamps that are our best shot at slowing the rate of atmospheric change, it will not be possible to supplement the area of land available for agriculture.
A warmer atmosphere means that it can retain more moisture. The downside of this is that it doesn't let that water fall as easily. When it does rain, it is a heavier, more violent downpour, much of which runs off of deforested areas in the form of floods which destroy valuable land, crops and infrastructure.
The loss of agricultural land also means that many skilled agricultural experts are leaving the areas where we need them and moving to cities where the chance to make money is perceived to be higher.
The warming also contributes to a large number of deaths in agricultural areas, whether from heat related health issues or the increasing spread of existing diseases or the occurrence of new ones. Reduced health or death of agricultural experts in rural areas.
We are also seeing weather anomalies that directly affect agriculture. There us snow in Bolivia, just before harvest time, reducing the amount of harvestable food. Drought and unseasonable warmth also affect the activities of pollinator insects, resulting in smaller yields.
Then we have the Great Extermination, the massive loss of global biodiversity. Many of the insects being killed off are pollinators, predators who eat pest insects, or others whose roles we don't even know about.
The Great Extermination is one result of The Great Simplification, where the myriad of checks and balances of a complex ecosystem are drastically reduced, leaving the door open to chaos. Our obsession with plantation agriculture is also steering us in that direction (there is even a term for that obsession - the Plantationocene).
Reduction in diversity of seed sources is leading to a reduction of options to grow certain crops with saved seeds.
Poverty
Other aspects, both political and economic (is there a difference any more?) have direct effects not only on food production but people's access to food.
Housing affordability, health care costs etc meaning that a larger portion of household income is not being spent on food. Money that could have been spent feeding a family now as to be spread over paying a roof over their heads and that is before they have time to think about education, unity bills and transportation costs. We think it's a US problem but a quick look around shows us that it is causing suffering right here as well.
Poverty of every sort prevents access to food, even when food is available. Both the inability to purchase food (let alone nutritious food) and the inability to travel to purchase it causes great difficulty. Even when food is available for free, through any of the many food banks and distribution vans, the cost of traveling to and from the food is prohibitive to some, especially those who live in food deserts and may have to travel hours.
Poverty is a product of the capitalist system that we have been suffering under. Poverty is created, sustained and even managed by those with the power to do so. It is an artificial construct that we have been led to believe is normal.
I've not written a conclusion because there is much more research to be done. There's no solutions in this post either, they are worth another post or two which I'll put up as I write about them.
