Dr Sarah Taber @SarahTaber_bww
Quick intro on Ukraine & grain:
Grain exports are not new! Greek city-states set up grain export colonies on Ukraine's Black Sea coast close to 3,000 years ago.
About half of Athens's grain came from Ukraine. If you want to talk "cradles of democracy," well.
A lot of Ukraine's Black Sea ports got their start as ancient Greek grain hubs: Sevastopol, Odessa, etc.
Funny enough the best info I could find for this history is case law. Athenian grain traders launched one of the first known antimonopoly case lol
Today the areas most reliant on Ukrainian grain are still the eastern Mediterranean & mideast. That's not too different from the situation in ancient Greece. Large cities in arid areas have a hard time growing enough grain to feed everybody, & Ukraine is the closest breadbasket.
Some places are already feeling bread shortages: Egypt, Yemen, and Lebanon. All of them already had food security challenges.
As soon as Ukraine's ports weren't able to ship grain, these places felt it in their food stocks almost immediately.
Hopefully grain shipments from elsewhere arrive soon. Cargo ships from India, Australia, South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, US, Canada, & other wheat exporters take longer to reach eastern med. Even if they left immediately once conflict started, they'd still be en route.
So far it looks like most of the grain & oilseed disruptions are loss of shipping ports. It's about inability to ship crops out of Ukraine, not inability to grow them.
If Russian leaves quickly & ports are ~intact, Ukraine's grain exports could bounce back quickly.
This is a v different scenario from WWI- which funny enough, even though it was 100+ years ago, is still the prototype for how we think about "wartime disruptions in grain supply."
WWI wrecked ports. But it also straight up killed a lot of the young poor men who did farm labor in Europe, where ag was mostly still done by hand.
And lots & lots of farmland was occupied by trench warfare & no man's lands. WWI kept grain from growing, nvmd getting shipped.
So far most of the fighting in Ukraine is urban. It's too muddy & sticky for Russian tanks to go rolling across fields & wrecking crops, even if they wanted to. When they move city to city they have to stick to single-file convoys on roads.
This is the legendary chornozem soil at work. Dark grassland soils with so much organic matter, they suck up water all winter long & stay pretty moist even during summer dry spells.
they are a BITCH on heavy artillery in cold, sloppy spring weather though lmaooooooo
This this is a war crime on wheels: thermobaric bomb launcher, known for big kill radius, horrifying deaths, & high civilian casualties.
And it can't go fuckin anywhere bc it tried to go off-roading on wet chornozem in springtime.
btw this isn't. like. specialized war-doer knowledge. Everyone in ag has to deal w moving heavy equipment over wet mucky fields in spring.
we're usually just hauling seeders & shit instead of artillery
So anyway, this is why Russian convoys are sticking to the roads.
As spring progresses & fields dry down, they will have more freedom to move heavy artillery straight across fields instead of using roads. That is bad news for grain yields & extremely bad news for Ukrainians.
Ukraine's wheat crops are mostly winter wheat.
That means you plant the seeds in fall, & they grow lil green leaves & then go dormant over winter. Then they mature in spring/summer into the ripe fields of grain.
So right now, the wheat crop is already planted and just chillin in the field. Where tanks fear to tread.
Based on what we're seeing in the news (big asterisk), the wheat crop is probably mostly undisturbed by the invasion. So far.
The next big event in Ukraine's crop calendar is planting sunflowers & corn. Those are summer crops, planted in spring & harvested in late summer/fall.
Ukraine's summer crop seasons roughly line up with northern US's. Planting is in May-ish & harvest is Sept-Nov-ish.
So if the Russian Army's still running around Ukraine in April/May, that likely means far less corn & sunflowers planted.
We're already anticipating wrecked roads & high price for seed, fertilizer, & gas. That doesn't necessarily stop planting but makes it ₴₴₴ expensive.
After spring planting for corn & sunflowers, the next job is harvesting wheat in mid/late summer. The wheat fields are (probably) ok rn. But again the more Russian tanks still running around Ukraine in midsummer, the less will get harvested. And can't ship it w/out working ports.
I don't love trying to make long-distance forecasts for a crop region I don't know very well, during an invasion that keeps catching the invaders by surprise
but yeah tl;dr the sooner Russia GTFOs the better
As far as potential food shortages, the problem is rarely a real food shortage.
The problem is food prices go high enough that a lot of people can't afford food.
The problem is poverty. Not "there isn't enough food to go around."
In the midst of the war effort food policy ppl need to keep an eye on Ukraine's more vulnerable grain customers, as well as Ukraine itself.
They are probably way ahead of me on this but it's worth repeating.
Also, if you're an aficionado of vulture capitalism, search "grain futures" on google or even right here on twitter.
the farmers & grain traders thirst posting about food shortages I MEAN high prices is really something to behold : /
Another point I've seen today which is that when you look at maps with the red shading for what is controlled by Russia, don't assume that everything else is controlled by Ukraine. The reality is that, large areas of the country which are miles upon miles of fields aren't controlled by anyone atm...