Posts Tagged ‘famine’

Peter Zeihan on A Second Holodomor in Ukraine

Tuesday, January 24th, 2023

Nothing to cheer you up quite like a discussion of potential genocide.

Takeaways:

  • He starts out talking about how Russia plans to add some 500,000 new troops and use them in a late spring offensive when the mud dries up. As I mentioned previously, that plan is only scheduled to produce new troops over several years, and I express grave doubts that Russia can train and equip new troops when it has singularly failed to do so thus far.
  • He reiterates from previous videos that Russia’s military is heavily dependent on rail, but they’ve had to make do with trucks, and those trucks have been heavily targeted by Ukraine.
  • “Russians began the war with 3,000 military support trucks they’re probably down to only about 500 now.”
  • “[Russians] are doing what they can to destroy morale, and destroy the Ukrainian economy, and kill as many Ukrainian civilians as possible. They’re using drones, they’re using fighter launch missiles, they’re using cruise missiles and they’ve started to use ballistic missiles, to target specifically Ukrainian physical infrastructure, most notably electricity generating plant.”
  • Ukraine is having trouble exporting grain. “Exports have fallen to almost nothing.”
  • He reiterates predictions of famine.

    The countries that would normally import from Ukraine, come October, November, December are going to realize it’s just not there. Most of those countries are in Africa, some are in South Asia. And the one I am, by far, the most worried about is Egypt. Egypt is poor and they import over half the grains they need to survive, mostly wheat. The wheat is already off-line, and so we should expect to see significant upheaval—economic, humanitarian, political—across the Arab world and into South Asia and in sub-Saharan Africa.

    • The mention of a second Holodomor is a reminder that not enough people know about the first Holodomor, when the Soviet Union starved some 5-7 million Ukrainians to death (and some 14.5 million total for the whole collectivization famine/”dekulakization”/suppression of the Kazakhs and Tartars/etc.

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    Posted in Communism, Foreign Policy, Military, video | 8 Comments »

    Ukraine Export Deal: Too Little, Too Late

    Sunday, August 7th, 2022

    You may remember Peter Zeihan’s analysis of world agricultural output in the wake of of deglobalization and the Russo-Ukrainian War, and his forecast of famine late this year.

    That was just before the Ukraine export deal was signed. Now he’s looked at the facts and run the numbers, and says it isn’t going to help much.

    Takeaways:

  • “Right now the Ukrainians have about 18 million metric tons stored up in their silos at or adjacent to their ports. That’s a lot that needs to move. That is in excess of half of a normal harvest for the country.”
  • “On August 1st we got our first ship, the Razoni, to dock to load up and to leave for Lebanon. It’s carrying 26,000 metric tons. So we need 700 more ships of this size if we’re going to get that grain out.”
  • “The Ukrainian harvest starts in less than 45 days. So you’re talking about needing to get a dozen or so vessels in there every single day. So far we’ve had one. I don’t have a lot of hope for this.” (Note: Since then we’ve had four more.)
  • “Right now the Ukrainians have nowhere to put it. Their silos are full from last year’s harvest. They weren’t able to export because the war started back in February.
  • “Even if the farmers were able to work their fields and not be molested by Russian troops (and remember we’ve already had mass evacuations from eastern and southern Ukraine) the problem remains that they can’t get fuel into the country. So you’re talking about needing to harvest industrial levels of wheat without industrial equipment.”
  • “The likely end result here is that this is the last year that Ukraine participates in international grain markets. They simply don’t have the capacity to get stuff up at a scale. In fact the only place that they might be able to ship stuff is by rail and at most with significant upgrades that have not yet been done. They can probably only ship about one-fifth of their normal produce out that way the rail lines are just not designed for that kind of bulk cargo.”
  • Why not? Well, the biggest problem is Ukraine has a different rail gauge from the rest of Europe, another Soviet legacy.

    Bottlenecks have arisen due to the different rail gauge used in Ukraine, dating back to the Soviet era. That means shipments are being transferred to new wagons at the border.

    Ukrainian Infrastructure Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov has targeted the upgrading of rail infrastructure in western Ukraine as a priority the EU should focus on. “Rail transport can partially undertake all the transportation of agricultural products, particularly grain,” he said. “However, transporting goods is difficult due to western Ukraine’s low border-crossing capacity, which is not designed for transshipping such volumes.”

    “Some 768,300 metric tons of Ukrainian grain was exported by rail between May 1 and May 16.”

  • Back to Zeihan: “And a lot of them have to transit little territory called Transnistra [in Moldavia], which is under Russian control.”
  • The sobering conclusion:

    You remove the world’s fourth largest wheat exporter from the market and you’re going to look at cascading problems. Not just with food prices and malnutrition, but civil conflict and breakdown, most notably in the Middle East. The last time we had a doubling of global wheat prices, we saw the Arab spring back in 2011. What we’re dealing with is an order of magnitude more complicated and deeper rooted. And to think that we’re only going to have doubling of prices is ridiculously optimistic.

    • Well, it’s a good thing the Middle East isn’t know for having populations full of unstable hotheads looking for an excuse to kill each other at the drop of a hat…

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    Posted in Economics, Foreign Policy | 8 Comments »

    Observing 2022 Victims of Communism Day

    Sunday, May 1st, 2022

    Today is May 1st, which means that once again it’s time to observe Victims of Communism Day, remembering that a false, brutal ideology killed over 100 million people.

    VictimsofCommunismDay

    Here’s a list of memorials to the victims of communism.

    With Ukraine in the news, it’s a hood time to look back on how horribly Ukraine suffered under Soviet Communism, especially in Stalin’s 1930-33 terror famine, the Holodomor. Here’s a video that covers the history of the Ukraine up to and through the Holodomor.

    More information on the Holodomor can be found in Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. Conquest estimated that for the entire Collectivization/”De-Kulakization”/Holodomor period (including the Soviet suppression of the Kazakhs and the Crimean Tartars, etc.) some 14.5 million died due to the actions of the Soviet government.

    Here’s Joe Rogan and Michael Malice discussing historical atrocities, including the East German concentration for children were the guards were allowed to rape their child charges as a matter of choice.

    Note that November 7 is also observed as a day commemorating the victims of communism. There’s no reason we can’t observe both…

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    Posted in Communism, video | 1 Comment »