Dynasties consistently fell in China, India, and Africa over eons.
The French Revolution kicked off and Europe didn’t stop burning until Napoleon was exiled the second time, arguably longer.
Waves of immigrants have fled to the USA across centuries, especially from Ireland.
The Arab Spring took root and toppled regimes, leading to waves of terrorism and the short-lived ISIS “caliphate.”
These are but a few of the examples of how political upheaval is inextricably tied to famine.
These are examples we should be considering today.
It’s planting season in Ukraine, and the effects will be felt worldwide. They’ll be most acute in a handful of already teetering nations.
A wave of upheaval is at hand, far from the front lines, and we’d be fools to ignore it.
Planting season in Ukraine is going to be woefully inadequate. Grains — especially wheat — and cooking oil exports functionally will not exist.
They account for some $27 billion of exports. But not all exports are equal.
Ukraine supplies the cheap, processed products that feed a wide swath of Middle East, Asian, and Pacific Rim nations. Shortages are already being reported.
Take Lebanon, for example. The country is functionally defunct already, and it imports 80% of its wheat from Ukraine.
Food prices are up some 1,000%. Thankfully we’re past the cold season (yes, it gets awfully cold there) since government services are already leveraged beyond sustainability due to debt.
As Maya Terro, founder of the nonprofit organization FoodBlessed, which feeds vulnerable people in Beirut, put it to NPR not long ago:
Some families have resorted to selling their belongings in order to use the money to buy food… The repercussions of war between Russia and Ukraine have led to catastrophic surges in food products like cooking oil, wheat, and some types of grains.
This cannot be fixed this month, this season, or this year. As much as we worry about domestic food price inflation, there is no replacement at a higher cost for millions, if not billions, worldwide.
As NPR notes in the same article, “This is playing out around the world. Global food prices shot up 12% between February and March, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), to the highest point since the FAO started tracking this index in 1990.”
While Europe and the U.S. can stomach the higher prices to an extent, food supply is pulled from elsewhere where prices aren’t as high.
This is creating a life-or-death problem that is far from its lowest point. The FAO surveyed 19 of 24 oblasts (think states or counties) and found that in the next three months, 40% of them will not even reliably be able to feed themselves.
Price fixes and supplemental food subsidies are being state-mandated from Egypt to Bangladesh and beyond. More will come. Those in place will have to increase. There is little money left for either.
The rest of the “bread baskets” of the world are functionally at maximum capacity for land usage.
That leaves one solution — increasing yield with fertilizer.
With global food prices surging 12% between February and March, there is only one way out — one that was already exceeding demand before all of this global disruption and inflationary madness.
Every acre needs to produce more. Every acre needs top-tier fertilizer.
High agricultural prices are making a surge in fertilizer use possible, and it is increasingly trickling down to companies and shareholders.
The Outsider Club’s Luke Burgess has been at the vanguard for information on this brewing problem, and his research has never been more important.
It is the difference between survival and mass starvation, nations failing, and global unrest the likes of which were only hinted at about 10 years ago in the Middle East… and have driven upheaval for eons.
