Guest essay by Eric Worrall

As the impact of the interruption of Russian fertiliser sales and Ukrainian grain supplies approaches, climate alarmists are mounting a campaign to claim the coming food price spike as a “climate crisis”.

War in Ukraine and Climate Change Could Combine to Create a Food Crisis

Russia’s invasion is halting the delivery of wheat to areas suffering from drought and other climate impacts

By Sara Schonhardt, Benjamin Storrow, E&E News on March 16, 2022

Russia’s war in Ukraine is squeezing food supplies in countries that depend on those two nations for critical grains and cooking oils.

The halt in agricultural shipments out of the Black Sea has sent the price of wheat and fertilizer soaring and prompted growing concerns of a global food crisis.

In Turkey, people are scrambling to buy cooking oil in anticipation of further price hikes. Thailand faces surging costs for fertilizer and feed stock. Egypt, the top importer of Russian wheat, has banned exports of homegrown grain, and Indonesia has halted exports of palm oil, a potential substitute for other vegetable oils. Aid groups worry that rising prices will exacerbate hunger in already vulnerable countries.

The Russian war is affecting two of the world’s agricultural powerhouses and comes as the global food system is already dealing with supply chain constraints due to the Covid-19 pandemic and climate-charged weather events.

Climate change could make the situation worse if agricultural production in the world’s other breadbaskets is disrupted this year by extreme weather events, said Jonas Jägermeyr, a climate scientist and crop modeler at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Sciences.

“Climate change is increasing weather and yield variability and if severe weather events such as droughts, heatwaves, or floods will hit this season there will be compound effects, destabilizing the food system further,” Jägermeyr wrote in an email. “China already indicated that their wheat outlooks are very poor and other world regions don’t look great either.”

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Read more: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/war-in-ukraine-and-climate-change-could-combine-to-create-a-food-crisis/

China’s food production is messed up because during the last few decades of economic growth, there was inadequate enforcement of safe disposal of industrial waste – so a lot of it ended up in landfill or in rivers, creating widespread heavy metal and toxic waste pollution. Much of that pollution is now likely spread across previously uncontaminated land by the floods.

In addition, in the 2020 floods, a lot of poorly constructed dams were demolished, to save the in my opinion poorly constructed Three Gorges dam.

Even with all these problems, the rest of the world was well on track to fill the resulting food shortfall, before Russia decided to start shelling a nuclear reactor in the heart of Europe’s bread basket, and interrupted sowing this year’s crops with their military invasion.

To try to attach the fake climate crisis to these almost entirely manmade problems, in my opinion in the hope of scoring a few cheap political points, well I think you can guess my opinion of such an act.