Are Worldwide Food Shortages Coming? Rising costs, lower crop yields.

[Pickman's model]

My guess is that climate disruption is going to lead to food shortages being fairly common from now on. The shortages will interact with political instability to exacerbate the problems. I suspect the days of fairly stable global food trade are over, and a lot of countries are going to wish they'd given more thought to food sovereignty. Or at least the people will, the politicians will continue to ignore the problems for as long as they can, because globalisation has produced a political class that can only see solutions in more globalisation.

Food sovereignty is an illusion when all crops can fail and tbh a global approach is needed so if crops fail in eg Kenya supplies can come from eg Brazil. My money's on food coming to us - the eu, the west, the global north - despite crop failures as it did from Ireland to England in the 1840s, as it did from Ethiopia in the 1980s. Sure, we won't be entirely insulated from crop failures but our future nutrition will be directly related to other people starving

 

[Funky_monks]

Food sovereignty is an illusion when all crops can fail and tbh a global approach is needed so if crops fail in eg Kenya supplies can come from eg Brazil. My money's on food coming to us - the eu, the west, the global north - despite crop failures as it did from Ireland to England in the 1840s, as it did from Ethiopia in the 1980s. Sure, we won't be entirely insulated from crop failures but our future nutrition will be directly related to other people starving

Maybe, but whats nuts is the context in which this is happening here.
"Rewilding" and its associated trading in carbon credits and biodiversity net gain makes these things a tradeable commodity, which big landowners appear to be going in for in a big way.
Knepp (Goldsmith) used to be arable, now "rewilded" (although the ploughs are apparently going back in there once every 8 years of so to get the ELMS payment for multispecies grassland creation, which they can only keep getting if they plough the old one up).
I've a mate over Basingstoke way lost 500ac of decent lowland pasture when the London property manganate landlord decided he was rewilding the lot after being told by Goldsmith that it was all it was good for. Know of several massive blocks of grade 1/2 arable land going for trees to get the payment (which will be monoculture softwoods).
National Trust are booting tennant farmers off all over the place for rewilding
Know of a big landowner in the SW (owns about 5%) of UK farmland, saying this generation of tenants will probably be the last as they chase these payments instead.......

Rewilding our most productive crop land in this context is mental.

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

Much less sown in 2022, because of fuel and fert prices, certainly in the UK, war in Ukraine and now crop abandonment in Kansas.

Harvest 2023 is gonna be interesting. Expect the price of grain to go through the roof.

https://www.usnews.com/news/top-new...rs-abandon-wheat-fields-after-extreme-drought

Yeah, the weather in this part of the world has been weird. It looks like rain for days at a time, but there's not a drop. I met someone from California a few years ago who was marveling at the rainy day we were having. He said that the sky would look like that in California, but they didn't get rain. Right now, a lot of people are having trouble breathing because of fires from Canada (me included). We've had fires here too, yet they are pulling out the trees and windbreaks their grandfathers worked so hard to get started. The soil just blows around and can be a hazard on the road. Basically, we didn't get any rain this spring, when we get most of our rain this time of year.

 

[Funky_monks]

Yeah, the weather in this part of the world has been weird. It looks like rain for days at a time, but there's not a drop. I met someone from California a few years ago who was marveling at the rainy day we were having. He said that the sky would look like that in California, but they didn't get rain. Right now, a lot of people are having trouble breathing because of fires from Canada (me included). We've had fires here too, yet they pulling out the trees and windbreaks their grandfathers worked so hard to get started. Basically, we didn't get any rain this spring, when we get most of our rain this time of year.

That's an issue thats being faced here - on Dartmoor, Natural England (who manage it) are basically trying to take sheep numbers on the Moor down to nothing - thats been tried in other places and fires always end up being more devastating

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

That's an issue thats being faced here - on Dartmoor, Natural England (who manage it) are basically trying to take sheep numbers on the Moor down to nothing - thats been tried in other places and fires always end up being more devastating

I'm seeing some corn acreage loss due to people taking dry land corn fields and converting it to pasture. Then, they put cattle on it.