Global Supply Chain In Chaos; Food Insecurity; Biden Pays To Put Farmland Into Conservation

If Shanghai ports are any indication, our supply chain is in for major disruptions.

Here is the backlog at the Port of Shanghai compared to recent history…

Current situation makes the spikes in 2021 look like nothing. pic.twitter.com/nW8HspbXwF

— Geiger Capital (@Geiger_Capital) April 18, 2022

Fortune references the same graph to show why 2022 shortages may prove far worse than what we experienced in 2021.

The covid lockdowns in China have highlighted the vulnerability in our global supply chain.  And it won’t be fixed anytime soon.

As quoted by Wired, one logistics professor has likened it to a flock of black swans coming at us:

“We used to occasionally have black swan events,” says Richard Wilding, professor of supply chain strategy at Cranfield University in the UK, referring to rare and hard-to-predict occurrences that have major impacts. ​“The problem at the moment is we have a whole flock of black swans coming at us.” Wilding says managing a supply chain used to involve 80 percent dealing with predictability and 20 percent coping with surprises, numbers that have now flipped. And he says a growing number of companies are now using tools that provide greater visibility into the flow of goods, and which can sometimes predict potential choke points. “You effectively need to have continual monitoring,” he says. In an age when everything is connected, the global supply chain—a mess of transportation routes connecting commodities to manufacturers to buyers—has until recently remained alarmingly analog.

The ripple effect of these disturbances is also creating food insecurity around the globe.

"If you think we’ve got Hell on earth now, you just get ready," said the World Food Bank executive director. "If we neglect northern Africa, northern Africa’s coming to Europe. If we neglect the Middle East, [the] Middle East is coming to Europe." https://t.co/q32o4Tp8iG

— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) March 26, 2022

Russia and Belarus, its closest ally, make up more than 40% of the global potash market, and potash is a key ingredient of many commercial fertilizers.  The war in Ukraine has sent fertilizer prices soaring with many tripling and quadrupling.

With food insecurity weighing on American minds, Biden’s administration is offering to pay farmers more money not to grow food.  Instead, his administration wants to put more farmland into conservation.

The Biden administration has announced that it would expand a program that pays farmers to leave land fallow. How the hell does this help the food supply crisis?

https://t.co/nbpDItiBsg

— James Melville (@JamesMelville) April 19, 2022

The Counter reports:

The goal is to add 4 million acres of farmland to the Conservation Reserve Program, which takes land out of production to blunt agriculture’s environmental impact.

We’re facing a global food crises and Biden’s people want farmland sitting idle?   What about the blunting impact farm land has against hunger?

Food insecurity
Energy insecurity
Crime insecurity
Financial insecurity
Security insecurity
All brought to us be brain addled Joe Biden. 😧😖😠 pic.twitter.com/6GNiGtPlrs

— Daniel F. Baranowski (@DFBHarvard) April 1, 2022

Will we see authorities in the US destroying gardens like the CCP is doing in China?  Food is a powerful weapon for control.

https://twitter.com/Based_ENG/status/1516009596065882121