The Majority Report has a farmer who calls in regularly from Nebraska, mostly to talk about the state of grain production both in the US, and globally. I’ve posted some of his calls before, because I find them useful. Longtime readers will know that I’ve been worried about the state of global food production for a while now, and that worry was increased by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, plus the many, record-breaking droughts that have been happening around the world this past year. As with a lot of good news relating to the climate, this is good because it means we’ve probably got a bit more time before catastrophe becomes unavoidable. That means more time for countries to try to change how they grow food.

I’ll be going more into this soon, but when it comes to food shortages, the middle and upper classes of rich, mostly white nations will see prices rise, but we are unlikely to actually starve at this stage. What will happen instead, is that food that would normally go to countries in Africa, in particular, will be diverted to places like the United States, Western Europe, and so on. It’s good that we’re probably not there yet, but make no mistake – that will come if we don’t change things. I’ve included a partial transcript of the video below, to cover Kowalski’s reasoning for this sort-of-rosy prediction.

[…]
It is looking like the U.S. is going to be producing very similar to last year. Not exactly a record, [but] mildly above average, which is good. Commodity prices have been coming down lately. There’s some good signs out of China that [their] summer crop was a bit better than they were expecting, but I personally won’t believe that until about December, when we know that definitively. They’ve done this before in order to drive down prices to buy South American grain cheap, but it looks like they probably are doing all right.

But aside from that. just there’s been too much heat in Europe. but they’re probably going to be okay. The U.S., the droughts in the southwest are still not great but there’s enough irrigation for now, so probably no major famine, but food prices will probably be up, especially in places like the Middle East and East Africa.

A lot of this is not good long term. If the fertilizer situation is not resolved… Basically, the ground can store nitrogen for a while, but from what I’ve been reading, a lot of places especially with marginal ground (particularly in like Africa and South America; [tropical soil is not as good as temperate soil, so] they rely more heavily on artificial fertilizers in order to have […] a crop that would be considered pretty poor in the States, and if they don’t get more fertilizer. they’re just there there isn’t going to be any left in the soil to use next year.

I know this might feel bleak for “good news”, but it’s important to remember that the fact that we know this stuff, means we have the ability to do something about it as a society. As ever, the goal is to build up our ability to wield collective power, so that we have the leverage to create change even if those at the top don’t want it.