Peter Zeihan: World Agricultural Output Is Screwed, US Output Is Not
Peter Zeihan (him again) spoke at Iowa’s Swine Day on the topic of Agriculture at the End of the World:
At lot of this is Zeihan’s polished Greatest Hits presentation (Deglobalization, the need to stop Russia in Ukriane to prevent a future conflict with NATO that would go nuclear, China’s demographic crash, the cult of personality/isolation of Xi Jinping, China’s absurd never-ending Flu Manchu lockdowns, etc.), but here are some highlights of specific agriculture topics:
Russia isn’t just destroying population centers in Ukraine, it’s deliberately targeting Ukraine’s agricultural infrastructure, including grain silos.
Odessa is not a normal city. It is at the mouth of the Nipur river, which is kind of their equivalent of the Mississippi, and it is also their manufacturing center. It’s a cultural hub. It’s a financial center. It is New York and Houston and St. Louis and Chicago and New Orleans all in one. And if the Russians succeed in capturing it, that is the end of Ukraine as a modern economic entity. Right now Odessa is under blockade. They can’t export anything. This has been the source of 95 of their exports to this point.
China’s pork industry got hit hard by swine flu three years ago, and they’re probably getting hit by it now.
They’re trying to regrow the swine industry with subsidies, but that’s just resulted in “Two million people who have no idea what they’re doing” buying the wrong kinds of feed.”
“If they don’t have pork, all they’ve got left is rice. Rice is the most phosphate input intensive crop.”
“The Chinese have traditionally been the world’s largest producer and exporter of phosphate, ’cause it’s a food security issue. Well they’ve stopped all exports until further notice. So we’ve lost potash because of the Ukraine War. We’ve lost phosphate because of Chinese mismanagement.”
Skipping over the oil stuff, but Texas is sitting pretty because it’s easier and quicker to bring shale oil production online.
Did I already mention that Zeihan says Russia is probably going to lose Siberian well use because if they can’t ship it off, it freezes in the permafrost?
“We’re not looking at a recession, we’re looking at an energy-induced depression that’s already affecting multiple continents. But not here…The baseline here are pretty good.”
The effect of reduced fertilizer supply to the rest of the world? “This is famine. We will have it again in the fourth quarter of this year…a half a billion to a billion people will suffer malnutrition.”
If you stop growing wheat on marginal land due to fertilizer shortage, you start growing it on your better land, and your export output collapses.
“The volume of internationally traded agricultural commodities is in the early stages of collapse.”
The Brazilian Serato is heavily dependent on external inputs from abroad. We, on the other hand, get the overwhelming majority of our fertilizer inputs nationally and from Canada.
“There is no Brazilian agricultural sector without Russian involvement. And Russian involvement is going away. It’s the world’s largest source of soy exports. And without global soy exports, there is not a global pork industry. Except here. And if we’re being nice, Canada too.”
Argentina will probably do fine as well.
“Your mid case scenario should be inflation of nine to 15% for at least the next five years.”
“You are looking at the fastest expansion in farm incomes, per person, and per acre that we have ever seen in this country’s history, and it will last for at least the remainder of this decade.”
I think Zeihan has a tendency to overstate the case sometimes, but he’s more right than wrong…
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8 Responses to “Peter Zeihan: World Agricultural Output Is Screwed, US Output Is Not”
watched the China soy situation for a bit back when they tried to move off US soy on to cheaper substitutes to retaliate for tariffs… the results were catastrophic as weakened herds developed and spread ASF until pork prices reached “civil unrest” prices… the move was not repeated
now August soy prices have nearly doubled, so if Brazilian output collapses there is not going to be much pork on Chinese tables next year… USDA had been forecasting a bumper 2023 soy crop in Brazil
May I just say that I really appreciate you posting the gist of these videos. In Zeihan’s case I actually do watch them more often than not, but I got started doing that specifically because you were telling me in detail what was in them. In most “hey look at this cool vid” cases, there is zero information, I have better things to do, and the one possibly-interesting thing in it is maybe 23 minutes in and 10 seconds long out of a 2-hour video, and I just can’t be bothered. But when you take the time to write up these summaries, I know what I’m getting into if I choose to watch it. Thank you.
Since March 2020 and Ukraine this February, global agriculture-shocks (crops and fertilizer, esp. in Ceylon) have reflected extraordinarily politicized supply-chain disruptions.
Despite this country’s hyper-inflated fuel, food, energy –all artificial constructs of reigning uniparty orthodoxy, a despotic dogma bent on “transforming” 230-year ideals to oligarchic police/surveillance slush– we’re hoping winter blackouts won’t affect America outside Rat-infested coastal enclaves.
Europe has long since made that bed. Hope fer best, keep your powder dry.
Zeihan’s videos are highly repetitive (in this case, this is a *good* thing–it means his claims aren’t being constantly disproved by reality), but they’re updated over time, and tailored to the audience in question, so there’s almost always a little something new in each one… and he’s been doing the industry convention circuit for a decade, now.
The next few years are not going to be much fun; and for other nations, they’re going to be even worse. I’m not looking forward to watching people starve on TV, but that’s now the best-case (least-horrific?) scenario. As he points out, government at this stage can’t really do anything to make the situation much better… but it can certainly do all kinds of things to make it much, much worse.
Our situation won’t be as good as it could be, because so many of our current policies are being thought up and implemented to mediocrities who have had little, if any, contact with the realities of the inputs and outputs of those policies. It’s all theoretical, not practical. Take our Sec’y of Ag. Please!!Check his record. Hs he ever spent a full hour *doing* agriculture? Same with Transportation, Energy, you name it.
We may be in luck, because the people driving policy in our competitors’ countries ae boot-licking mediocrities. So we may ‘win’ by default.
Much of US Agriculture output depends on fuel for transport, grain processing, fertilizer availability. The Dems seem dependent on the socialist and Climate obsessed Left. Increased profit fir the agricultural sector means higher food prices for the consumer.
How much can Biden and the Democrats disrupt the bright future for American (and Canadian) agriculture, especially if our “Worthies” are getting a slice of the profits from fuel supply manipulation?
[…] would think that with the world facing the prospect of widespread famine later this year, that the the commissars might pause their radical, agriculture-destroying policies until that […]
[…] 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 […]
watched the China soy situation for a bit back when they tried to move off US soy on to cheaper substitutes to retaliate for tariffs… the results were catastrophic as weakened herds developed and spread ASF until pork prices reached “civil unrest” prices… the move was not repeated
now August soy prices have nearly doubled, so if Brazilian output collapses there is not going to be much pork on Chinese tables next year… USDA had been forecasting a bumper 2023 soy crop in Brazil
May I just say that I really appreciate you posting the gist of these videos. In Zeihan’s case I actually do watch them more often than not, but I got started doing that specifically because you were telling me in detail what was in them. In most “hey look at this cool vid” cases, there is zero information, I have better things to do, and the one possibly-interesting thing in it is maybe 23 minutes in and 10 seconds long out of a 2-hour video, and I just can’t be bothered. But when you take the time to write up these summaries, I know what I’m getting into if I choose to watch it. Thank you.
Since March 2020 and Ukraine this February, global agriculture-shocks (crops and fertilizer, esp. in Ceylon) have reflected extraordinarily politicized supply-chain disruptions.
Despite this country’s hyper-inflated fuel, food, energy –all artificial constructs of reigning uniparty orthodoxy, a despotic dogma bent on “transforming” 230-year ideals to oligarchic police/surveillance slush– we’re hoping winter blackouts won’t affect America outside Rat-infested coastal enclaves.
Europe has long since made that bed. Hope fer best, keep your powder dry.
Zeihan’s videos are highly repetitive (in this case, this is a *good* thing–it means his claims aren’t being constantly disproved by reality), but they’re updated over time, and tailored to the audience in question, so there’s almost always a little something new in each one… and he’s been doing the industry convention circuit for a decade, now.
The next few years are not going to be much fun; and for other nations, they’re going to be even worse. I’m not looking forward to watching people starve on TV, but that’s now the best-case (least-horrific?) scenario. As he points out, government at this stage can’t really do anything to make the situation much better… but it can certainly do all kinds of things to make it much, much worse.
Our situation won’t be as good as it could be, because so many of our current policies are being thought up and implemented to mediocrities who have had little, if any, contact with the realities of the inputs and outputs of those policies. It’s all theoretical, not practical. Take our Sec’y of Ag. Please!!Check his record. Hs he ever spent a full hour *doing* agriculture? Same with Transportation, Energy, you name it.
We may be in luck, because the people driving policy in our competitors’ countries ae boot-licking mediocrities. So we may ‘win’ by default.
Much of US Agriculture output depends on fuel for transport, grain processing, fertilizer availability. The Dems seem dependent on the socialist and Climate obsessed Left. Increased profit fir the agricultural sector means higher food prices for the consumer.
How much can Biden and the Democrats disrupt the bright future for American (and Canadian) agriculture, especially if our “Worthies” are getting a slice of the profits from fuel supply manipulation?
[…] would think that with the world facing the prospect of widespread famine later this year, that the the commissars might pause their radical, agriculture-destroying policies until that […]
[…] 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 […]