The wildfires now devastating western Russia are evidence of global warming. Once-in-a-century extreme weather events happen, on average, once a century but this has been far more often now…
And the Russian government’s response is precisely what you would expect when global warming really starts to bite: Moscow has just banned all grain exports for the rest of this year and to be extended into the next one also. Some people talk about overreaction of the old Russian bear mentality… But maybe it ain’t so.
At least 20 percent of Russia’s wheat crop has already been destroyed by the drought, the extreme heat, circa 40 º C for several weeks now, and the resultant wildfires.
The export ban is needed, explained Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, because “we shouldn’t allow domestic prices in Russia to rise, we need to preserve our cattle and build up supplies for next year”. If anybody starves, it won’t be Russians.
That’s a reasonable position for a Russian leader to take, but it does mean that some people will starve elsewhere. Russia is the world’s fourth-largest grain exporter, and anticipated shortages in the international grain market had already driven the price of wheat up by more than 80 percent since early June. When Putin announced the export ban, it immediately jumped by another eight percent.
The World Bank on Monday urged countries to refrain from imposing policies that could trigger a new global food price crisis as drought-hit Russia said it could extend a grain export ban into next year.
World Bank Managing Director Ngozi Iweala told Reuters the sharp spike in grain prices since last week did not amount to a crisis yet, but emphasized increased food price volatility would hurt poorer countries. She said the poverty-fighting institution would activate a food fund when the World Bank board, currently in recess, reconvened in early September in case the situation worsened.
Grain prices have soared since last week after Russia, the world’s No. 3 wheat producer in 2009/10, banned grain exports as the worst drought on record ravaged crops across the Black Sea region and concerns grew about supplies from dry weather in Western Australia.
In Ukraine, the world’s sixth-largest wheat exporter, grain exports are facing delays after the introduction of a new system of customs controls last week, while bad weather there could cut crop and exports forecasts.
Ngozi Iweala said the World Bank was conducting a survey of vulnerable countries amid reports that exporters had cancelled wheat contracts to Bangladesh and were reviewing contracted wheat supplies to Egypt, the world’s largest wheat importer. She said flooding in India, Pakistan the US, Canada and China had also raised food supply concerns.
The World Bank as usual sounded cool saying in a statement: ”We don’t see a crisis yet and are hoping to head it off by asking countries not to undertake policies that will precipitate a crisis.”
Still this means that food prices will rise significantly, but that is a minor nuisance for most consumers in the developed countries, since they spend only about 10 percent of their income on food. In poor countries, where people spend up to half of their income on food, and in some cases 90% of it with the steeper increases; the higher prices will mean that the poorest of the poor cannot afford to feed their children properly, thus denying them the most basic human right to survive.
Yet although one can understand how governments would want to … implement certain polices they think are good domestically, those policies are not always the best, like export restrictions and bans, and have a strong impact on the market and cause hoarding and inefficient distribution that in turn it causes famines and devastating malnutrition and huge loss of lives amongst the most vulnerable populations and is hitting especially hard, the children of the world.
A thousand times as many people will be lost; as the 3,000-odd Russians who have been killed by the flames and the smoke and who have drowned when seeking cool in the waters of Russia. But these people across the globe are the missing…
For they will die quietly, one by one, in under-reported parts of the world, so nobody will notice. Because when food exports are severely reduced or banned by several major producers at once and the international grain market freeze up, everybody will feel the pain. Yet the ones who let go are the weakest ones…
And that is the biggest violation of Human Rights we perpetuate in the name of our own food security. For we have food enough that goes rotten… What we don’t have is an efficient system of distribution and a technologically advanced method of tracking and matching need and fulfillment. Instead we rely n a simple ineffective and overhyped market of simple supply and demand that is so burdened by toxic subprime-like instruments and financial levers that make it ungovernable and highly suspect in it’s effectiveness.
Still one can only hope that countries where grain production is still good, such as in the United States, Brazil and the EU, would make up for the decline in outputs and the lack of exports from Russia.
Global food stocks are better today than in 2008, when food prices rose to record levels, triggering food shortages, malnutrition, famines and lack of basic food in poor countries.
The World Bank food fund, is the institution that could be ready to quickly disperse funding to countries if the situation warranted it. The fund was created during the 2008 price crisis to help developing countries facing food shortages and to help them increase production.There was about about $800 million in the fund to help developing countries. The fund disbursed roughly $1.2 billion during the 2008 crisis, while the World Bank also increased agricultural lending in its programs to boost food production but without any desired large scale increases achieved.
Although we are worried about the impact of continued basic grain price increases and lack of availability of food stocks, the poor countries have not called out yet for help.
At the Environmental Parliament, we are doing a quick survey ourselves to see which Peoples are the most vulnerable to this Climate crisis and whether their food contracts are being impacted.
A recent study of 26 developing countries showed significant increase in food price volatility over the past year.
Even in the UK and the US we are three days away from food riots if the food pipeline seizes up for any reason.
That is the food supply system and the turnaround of the supermarkets feeding our cities and concentrated populations.
Therefore perceptions of food security are just as important as the reality of it.
Maybe that is why the Generals in both China and the US are concerned about it.
Yours,
Pano
PS:
The next decade will surely favour us with dramatic results.
When you get seventy inches of snow in Washington and in a few months within the hottest summer you get the wettest July and floods in the Midwest; the Climate warming game is up.
One side has won.
Nature and a warming planet have called our bluff…
Side effects?
One is the fact that global grain production, which kept up with population growth from the 1950s to the 1990s, is no longer doing so. It may even have flatlined and declined in the past decade, although large annual variations make that uncertain, whereas the world’s population is still growing at an alarming rate…
Another is the world’s grain reserve, which was 150 days of eating for everybody on the planet 10 years ago, and has fallen to little more than a third of that. To clarify: the “world grain reserve” is not a mountain of grain somewhere, but the sum of all the grain from previous harvests that is still stored in various places just before the next big Northern Hemisphere harvest comes in.
We now have a smaller grain reserve globally than a prudent civilization in ancient Greece or China, or even India, or Mesopotamia or Egypt would have had 3,000 years ago.
Demand today is growing not just because there are more people, but because there are more people rich enough to put more meat into their diet and thus deprive agricultural land from growing grains. So things are very tight even before climate change hits hard as is expected to do.
And that is the other shoe dropping: Of course, it’s global warming. The rule of thumb is that with every one-degree Celsius rise in average global temperatures, we lose 10 percent of global food production. In some places, the crops will be damaged by drought; in others by much hotter temperatures. Or, as in Russia’s case today, by both.
So food production will be heading down as demand continues to increase, and something has to give. What will probably happen is that the amount of internationally traded grain will dwindle as countries ban exports and keep their supplies for themselves. That will mean that a country can no longer buy its way out of trouble when it has a local crop failure: there will not be enough exported grain for sale.
This is the vision of the future that has even the professional soldiers and the security experts worried. A world where access to enough food becomes a big political and strategic issue even for developed countries that do not have big surpluses at home.
It would be a very ugly world indeed, teeming with climate refugees and failed states and interstate conflicts over water, which after all is the most important nourishment – ”food.”
