Tighten your belts

 I refer you to this extensive, comprehensive, and apprehensive Kos diary by Bilboteach. I discussed this with a friend the other day and I'm not sure he took me seriously. A consequence of the Russian invasion of Ukraine will be a global food shortage. Ukraine is a major grain exporter, and Russia is a major exporter of nitrogen fertilizer on which, unfortunately, the global food supply is completely dependent. Higher fuel costs will also increase the cost of food.

Futures prices for basic food commodities -- wheat, maze, soybeans -- have soared already. It seems inevitable that there will be famine in poor countries, while in the rich countries people's grocery bills may double. The world has become so interdependent that a disruption such as the loss of Ukraine's grain crop will unravel the global network that gets calories into humans. There is barely enough agricultural land on the planet to sustain the current population as it is, and it's only enough because of intensive additions of synthetic fertilizer, along with plants that have been highly modified by selective breeding or genetic engineering that can't grow in natural soil, planted in vast monocultures tended by immense machines. The whole enterprise depends on fossil fuels. It wasn't sustainable but now it's going to be tested as never before.

The result may be political disruption, not only in poor countries that experience famine but also in wealthy countries where food will become unaffordable for low income people and food prices will create substantial stress on the middle class. We know how short-sighted and misinformed the American people are, and we know they will blame the incumbent president and party no matter how irrational that may be, and we can't count on the corporate media to explain things to them either. 

This is real, folks. We need to fundamentally change the way we live, replacing our fossil-fuel powered momentary hallucination of prosperity with a civilization fueled by renewable energy and sustainable agriculture. In that world, the global plutocrats who are sucking our blood, including the insane ones like Vladimir Putin, will wither away. But it has to start happening now, or God help us, and he won't.