Checking the Larder

Photo from Flickr

How’s your larder?

Take a look at India, which banned exports of its wheat earlier this year. This isn’t a one-year reduction in the crop. It’s year on year. After curbing rice exports last autumn, now India has banned export of non-basmati white and broken rice and put a cap on sugar export.

For context, India accounts for more than 40% of the world’s rice production. Last year the type of rice affected by the ban was about 45% of their rice exports.

They’re also short of tomatoes due to crop failure. Other crops such as peas and ground nuts are dying in the fields in extreme heat.

They have more people to feed than most countries, so it’s noticeable when their food supply is in trouble, but India isn’t the only place having trouble with food production. Wheat crops are significantly down in multiple major producing countries around the world, as an example.

China, India and Russia are the world’s largest producers of wheat. The USA comes it as fourth largest. In the USA, we think of Kansas as part of the Breadbasket portion of the country. The USDA estimates the wheat crop there will be the smallest since 1961. Their 10 year average is 332 million bushels. For 2023, the estimate is 191 million.

It's too soon to know the impact of this summer’s dire heat wave on California’s prime growing region or on the Rio Grande valley. A large proportion of the USA’s fresh produce comes from there. It doesn’t look encouraging.

One of my friends is living on a small island with plenty of puffins and not many people. In terms of potential exposure to diseases, she’s very safe unless she gets too close to a puffin that has bird flu. But she’s near the end of supply lines. Everybody else has a chance to nab food before it gets anywhere near her.

Then the news from India flew by this morning. I checked a little deeper. We’d been discussing non-perishable food in email, but… blimey!

So… How’s your larder?