Historic fertilizer crunch threatens food security
I&#x27;m always bothered by stories like these that seem to do a reasonable job of listing causes of self-inflicted problems, and then try to act like it was some sort of inevitable act of God, or natural law of the universe or something.<p>According to TFA the causes are:<p>1. Back-to-back storms in the USA causing production shutdowns. OK, that one is genuinely just random natural variance.<p>2. Natural gas price explosion. This is due largely to sanctions on Russia. Governments don&#x27;t actually have to sanction Russian natural gas. It&#x27;s a choice, one that can be undone tomorrow if need be.<p>3. Sanctions on a major Belarusian potash producer. Same thing. Belarus isn&#x27;t even Russia. This could be fixed tomorrow with the wave of a bureaucrat&#x27;s pen.<p>4. Ongoing side effects of lockdowns. This was a major own goal. People warned at the time you can&#x27;t just shut down the economy even if actually <i>had</i> worked, which it didn&#x27;t. This one sits squarely in government footgun area.<p>5. China has restricted exports of phosphate to build up stockpiles at home. Once again, governments are creating the damage here.<p>6. &quot;Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which effectively cut off nearly a fifth of the world’s nutrient exports&quot;. For the third time, no, <i>governments</i> cut off those nutrient exports. It wasn&#x27;t some sort of physical law that said invasions =&gt; cut off nutrient supply. It was and is a choice.<p>What seems to be happening here is that comfortable and powerful politicians have decided that showing how much they care about Ukraine is more important than people eating. The poor around the world will starve, so (primarily) European countries can wave a blue and yellow flag over their bodies. It feels very wrong.