THE GODS OF THE COPYBOOK HEADINGS ARE LIKE “CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS SH*T?” Scottish Government Ignores Frantic Food Crisis Warnings, Embraces Green Piety.
The Ukraine was the bread basket of Europe, and Russia was a major source of fertiliser. Yet as the interruption of grain and fertiliser supplies raises the spectre of crop failures and severe food shortages, senior British politicians are ignoring frantic pleas from farmers to release arable land reserved for “re-wilding” projects, and other whacky green schemes. . . .
Fertiliser application makes a big difference to crop productivity – around 35 – 60% of modern crop yields is attributable to application of fertiliser. We might get away with one year of reduced fertiliser application, but If soils are depleted by a series of years in which inadequate fertiliser is applied, crop yields could drop by more than 60%.
It doesn’t take much to trigger a food crisis. In 2007-2008 the world experienced a food crisis. The 2007-2008 crisis was not severe enough to significantly affect rich nations, but it led to mass starvation and riots in poor countries. The root cause in that case was a series of droughts, and excessive biofuel subsidies. Just a small blip in production and use of food was enough to push millions of people into hunger.
There is no way of knowing how the current food crisis risk will play out, and who will be affected.
Time is running out to make a decision – northern nations like Britain have very well defined planting and growing seasons. Some high nutrition plants like potatoes grow well throughout Britain, including Scotland, but planting must start in the next month, for most crops, or it will be too late to harvest by the end of Summer.
I strongly suggest people in Britain let green obsessives like Minister Lorna Slater know their “nature emergencies” and re-wilding projects can wait, before British food prices spiral out of the reach of poor people.
Most of the West is run by woke morons. The West’s wealth has largely insulated it from the costs associated with having morons in charge, but we’ve pretty much run through the safety margins.
Related: Not all the morons are in the West, of course: In Sri Lanka, Organic Farming Went Catastrophically Wrong: A nationwide experiment is abandoned after producing only misery.
Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa promised in his 2019 election campaign to transition the country’s farmers to organic agriculture over a period of 10 years. Last April, Rajapaksa’s government made good on that promise, imposing a nationwide ban on the importation and use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and ordering the country’s 2 million farmers to go organic.
The result was brutal and swift. Against claims that organic methods can produce comparable yields to conventional farming, domestic rice production fell 20 percent in just the first six months. Sri Lanka, long self-sufficient in rice production, has been forced to import $450 million worth of rice even as domestic prices for this staple of the national diet surged by around 50 percent. The ban also devastated the nation’s tea crop, its primary export and source of foreign exchange.
Britain is much bigger than Sri Lanka, and it won’t be the only place facing difficulties.