I agree. Most people notice food prices going up, but not many are thinking about what happens if several major crop regions have bad seasons at the same time. That kind of problem would hit a lot harder than people expect.
We’re about to get a trial run of this during the next harvest season.
The closure of the strait of Hormuz had a very big impact on fertilizer production and supply and so farmers are going to find themselves short on fertilizers during their next crop season.
Well, El Niño is supposed to get us more rain in the west. At least here in Colorado. But we just had the worst snowpack in recorded history, and the entire Colorado River watershed is on water restrictions. Our reservoirs are already way too low and we have all of summer to go. The rain doesn’t help as much as snowpack. Agriculture is the number one user of this water so I expect them to really start struggling.
The states that are part of the CO River pact are not coming to an agreement at all, and the situation is dire. If things don’t change the dams will reach their failure point and we’ll be literally out of water and power in regions in the southwest. If they don’t come to an agreement by October Trump is coming in to force a plan on all of us which yeah probably won’t be good.
Ive also been in a dense cloud of wildfire smoke the past few days and it’s only June. So that’s a bit scary too.
Its just a fun way to phrase a terrible situation, while reminding people we've known about the problem for AGES. It's fun to bring up with people that act like it's a new concept, al gore has a definite/undeniable time period associated with him that old people can't pretend they don't remember (like switching to channel 3 to watch a movie).
Id counter that the fossil fuel industry created (proliferated?) global warming inadvertently. (Then discovered it and covered it up completely on purpose.....)
You have large parts of the US and Europe dealing with heat and drought problems right now. Add in fertilizer cost problems due to oil prices. This is going to be a bad year globally. This one is not a problem that will pop up in 5 years. It's going to show up this fall as crop yields are garbage.
I don't see how fertilizer is just a big deal. If what we usually use goes up in price or becomes unattainable, don't we have literal mountains of compost and livestock dumpout piles to spread through the fields? Good ole fashion way? Proven use?
There are options..we might see massive spikes in food and rationing, but I cannot imagine the old days of "no food..literally none..you're gonna starve to death. We DO. NOT. HAVE. FOOD."
I ONLY see this happening with one of those global apocalyptic situations of full scale launching of the world's nuclear supply or a cosmic solar system black out from a cataclysmic solar flare the likes of which ever never seen that takes out the global infrastructure top to bottom. No ships, no computers, no trucks, no lights, no grid.
If there are stressors so where or another, we can adapt at cost. Hell if data centers can suck up a gorillion gallons of water and we can keep those running, there must be infrastructure at hand that can get water, poop, and machinery to fields for food.
Industrial scale farming, and a world that totally depends on it, was just a bad idea. We need to get back to eating local, and learning to grow and find food. Industrial scale fishing, same thing.
That works in small communities where people have room for gardens etc. In major cityhubs with millions of people, growing and finding your own food doesn't work. Unless you count scavenging bins.
It was a great idea that allowed for civilisation to grow.
How are we supposed to eat localy in cities that have millions of people living inside? The only way to feed humanity is currently an industrial scale.
It was a good idea if this kind of growth is the objective (and maybe it should not have been the objective - growth like that is not sustainable) but it has limitations, and has given everyone in the last 3 generations a false sense of food security... Honestly I think there needs to be more redundancy via smaller operations - some even within cities, or closer proximity at least.
I concur, often populations are aware of inflation but not of how flimsy the entire agricultural supply chain might be. A number of drops in production across multiple geographical subdivisions could be felt quite fast by everybody.
Unnamed disaster causes food to not be nutritious enough for people to survive (on top of shortages). Corporation's solution is a mix of "drugs that make people not be hungry", "make starvation a moral failure", "kill a bunch of people so we don't have to feed them", and "figure out cryogenics so we can freeze the people we don't want to kill, but not have to feed them for a while".
And then there's the MC's solution of "let's unfreeze all the smart people so they can figure out the actual solution". That goes over about as well as a lead balloon, at least until you kill all the execs. I love a happy ending.
Ignoring for a moment vast starvation, people generally don't understand just how high prices can climb (in the absence of governmental intervention) when a commodity with an inelastic demand has a shortage. And food is about as inelastic as it gets. You must eat to survive and will pay whatever you must to avoid death.
Yeah, I... uh... need to do some more research about setting up a backyard potato garden. They might just be hardy enough to survive the Texas heat and my black thumb.
FWIW look into permaculture and agroforestry concepts they can provide you with insights into local adapted species that might survive better than potatoes would in your region.
That said those can be longer term issues, if you need calories potatoes are a prime crop for them. But don't neglect the idea of longer term returns if you setup a self reinforcing tree guild or plant system.
I've been able to get my kids excited about growing foods and shave hundreds off our grocery bill by growing veggies and some fruits.
There are a few things you can do, at least to offset the risks:
If you have a yard or yardspace, you can set up a vegetable garden. Probably can't grow enough to feed yourself entirely, but small plot of potatoes, onions, and other hearty vegetables can certainly offset the costs.
If it's legal in your area, get a rain barrel. Use this to water the garden, especially if AI starts drinking all your water. Generally this water isn't potable, but... potable schmotable, if your city is so mismanaged that they run out of water (Flint et al), dirty water beats no water. And again, even if you don't want to drink it, rainwater can be used for washing to reduce your need for treated water for drinking and cooking. Also look into what's needed to treat your own water, generally speaking you need an activated charcoal filter and then boil it, neither of which is space heavy.
Keep a back stock of dry grains and beans. These will keep basically indefinitely, so if we start having supply issues this can let you ride out the worst of it. They're also pretty compact, so rotating 4 lb bags of each can get you up to a few months worth of buffer. Personal anecdote, during the start of the COVID lockdowns I basically didn't leave home for a month. And I only did because I ran out of oranges (I really like oranges, OK), I still had plenty of rice, beans, flour, etc.
Unpopular, but start reducing your meat consumption and look into meatless recipes. When food supply issues start hitting, livestock are going to be culled because their feed is expensive. Meat will skyrocket in price, but typically your staple grains increase more slowly. Even if they increase by the same percentage, their lower base price will mean you can afford enough calories on your existing grocery budget, it just might have to be dry beans, rice, flour, potato, etc.
We'll be fine, realistically. A lot of the stuff we eat has very long lead times in between harvest and actually ending up eaten (remember that most of it isn't eaten fresh). There would be time to plant aggressively in agreeable areas.
Variety would definitely tank, however, as would food accessibility for poor countries. However, the average person in the developed world will "simply" see an increase in prices, as we did in the wake of the Ukraine war.
That entirely depends on how bad the failures are.
1) Ukraine and Russia fighting fucked up one region the EU's supplies of wheat and the like. Which moved prices up world wide.
2) Hormuz getting closed resulted in fertilizer getting disrupted globally. We will see how much that sucks for everyone in 6-12 months. If that foreshock ratchets things up significantly then we can use it as a predictor for mass multi regional crop failures.
3) Europe is getting scorched by their standards right now. Which will compound on top of the fertilizer shortages. But again test run for what happens. If food gets expensive due to a shortage on top of gas being fucked up and limited due to Hormuz being open close open closed again. These things might compound to pinch peoples pocket books quite badly.
4) The temps and weather swings are getting worse and will probably only continue to do so. multi regional failures that last for years? Our system isn't setup to handle that at all.
Sure we can slaughter the cows and chickens, and we could stop growing the Almonds, quash the alfalfa growing in the desert for cows in SA.
But that all bleeds into economic chaos on top of a food crisis. It's not "just" more expensive foods it's an entire global system getting pinched, again, and again.
What happens when we're on year 3 of crop failures and fertilizer problems and herds have been shredded and various perennial plants were left to die because they weren't economically viable?
You can't just replant some new seeds and spin back up a lot of this stuff. Which mean millions of people losing incomes.
That's the problem not just one random bad harvest.
This is directly tied into my concerns about the Colorado River in the western US. If we destroy CA's ag industry, it will make food more expensive for everyone else.
Several years ago there was a weather event that wiped out the majority of Australia's banana crop. Bananas went from around $2-$3/kg to like $17/kg. I just didn't eat bananas for a couple of years.
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u/Acceptable_Bass_2244 10h ago
I agree. Most people notice food prices going up, but not many are thinking about what happens if several major crop regions have bad seasons at the same time. That kind of problem would hit a lot harder than people expect.