Absent the complex mix of species and varying ages of trees found in old-growth forests, the young pines became perfect tinder during the heat dome, burning hot and fast.įood burned too. Imagine, then, fields of geometrically arranged trees, all identical in height. However, at industrial scales, pines’ virtues begin to pale.Ĭommercially grown pine forests contain trees of the same age to make planting and harvesting more convenient. Pines are often planted commercially because they make good lumber and can better withstand drought than other commercial species. Russia accounts for over 10 percent of the global roundwood trade. The worst of the heat- and fire-seared land in Russia had been subjected to cycles of industrial agriculture for pine forests and cereals. At the time the heat dome was dubbed a one-in-five-hundred-year event by 2100 such heat waves are predicted to occur in Europe and North America every two or three years.Ĭolonial legacies, climate change, and capitalism drive hunger-it will only get worse in the 2020s. However, when a heat dome squatted over Russia from June through August of 2010, killing 55,000 people (primarily due to air pollution from wildfires), the news went global. When one-fifth of Pakistan flooded, it was difficult to find any information in news headlines. That year a huge wobble in the Northern Hemisphere’s jet stream created two weather disasters: one in Pakistan and one in Russia. The only difference is that this time, it will be worse.Īs a lesson in the complexity of today’s emergency, consider a particularly dark story in the history of hunger from 2010. The rise in prices and hunger triggered by the war will cause a wave of rebellions, just as food price spikes have in the past: as with the 2010 demonstrations that inaugurated the Arab Spring, the 2007–8 wave of food protests from Haiti to Italy, and the 1980s and ’90s International Monetary Fund (IMF) riots. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine seals a fate that was already inked by the woefully inadequate economic and political responses to COVID-19. In 2022 we will be lucky if only 830 million people are deprived of 2,100 calories a day. Meanwhile a worsening drought in the Horn of Africa threatens to put 20 million people at risk of starvation. The war in Ukraine has piled an additional 8–13 million people onto that. Although 2021 numbers are still preliminary, malnutrition in the Global South was widely understood to be worse, with USDA projections suggesting a roughly 7 percent increase. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, 118–161 million more people joined their ranks. The appalling 2014 statistic reporting that 606.9 million people are undernourished-around 8.3 percent of the global population-may be remembered as the closest humanity came to ending hunger in the twenty-first century. That will push 13.1 million more people into malnourishment, most of whom will be in the Asia-Pacific and Sub-Saharan African regions. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations calculates that, worst-case scenario, food prices will rise by an additional 8.5 percent by 2026–2027. Croupiers at grain trading desks the world over are readying themselves for bumper bonuses amid the meager harvests. The markets are already pricing in the shortfall. Even if farmers were to bend seasons, soil, and rain to their will, spring wheat won’t be ready for four months. Farther north, only a small minority of Canadian farmers are bothering to plant more for the spring harvest. The malnutrition caused by Russia’s war on Ukraine cannot be fixed by planting new wheat. Higher food prices will lead to more people going hungry-and digging won’t solve the problem.
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