Talk:World food crises (2022–present)

Needs Copy-editing

Hello,

As a new Wikipedian, I'm not sure how to do it myself, but this article needs to be marked for needed improvements to spelling, encyclopedic tone, etc. I've made a few minor fixes, but more are needed.

Also, there's some confusion around the use of 'crises' (as a singular) vs 'crisis' - I'm not sure if the article was intended to be named '2022 food crisis', but it's possible.

Thanks,

Chernorizets (talk) 05:28, 18 April 2022 (UTC)

Never mind, added the copy edit tag. Still not sure about the title though. Chernorizets (talk) 07:20, 18 April 2022 (UTC)

Illustrations

Why don't we have some price charts at least? There are also a lot of photos of grain terminals in Southern Ukraine damaged by Russian missile strikes but I could found free ones neither on Commons nor via Google. =( Ain92 (talk) 22:15, 15 June 2022 (UTC)

@Ain92 if you know how to create the graphs, that would be great! Unfortunately this is such an emerging trend, that most of the graphics are copyrighted by news organizations, Sadads (talk) 09:24, 25 July 2022 (UTC)

• I'm sure folks at Wikipedia:Graphics Lab/Illustration workshop could make a much better chart in much shorter time than me. ;-) Ain92 (talk) 10:20, 25 July 2022 (UTC)

Unclear where this article is heading in the longer term? Its focus?

I am unsure whether an article title of "2022 food crises" really makes sense in the longer term. So what happens when we start January 2023, we no longer update this article but start a new one called "2023 food crises"? If this one is specifically about the impacts of the Ukraine war and wheat exports in 2022 OK but I see content about climate change being added. If that is the case, this will be with us far beyond 2022. So I wonder if the article should be streamlined so that any content related to climate change is mainly at effects of climate change on agriculture rather than being here in detail as well. EMsmile (talk) 09:06, 25 July 2022 (UTC)

So you would probably frame it as 2022-23, etc or turn it into something longer -- however, for right now this phenomena (because of price skyrocket) is new, notable, and substantially different than the COVID era food insecurity. Streamlining right now would be premature, because this a temporal event made notable because of the War in Ukraine sparking a particular set of circumstances created by climate change and the pandemic, Sadads (talk) 09:16, 25 July 2022 (UTC)

Think the idea of this page is sound. Eventually a common approach across "2007–2008 world food price crisis", "2010–2012 world food price crisis", and this page would seem appropriate. However, given the unfolding nature this is perhaps premature. 192.41.114.229 (talk) 13:11, 28 July 2022 (UTC)

As of July 1st 2023, are there still reasons for concern or can the subject be definitely put in the past? Trexerman (talk) 14:13, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

The sentence "In the years 1961-2022 the productivity of the global agriculture sector declined by 21%, due to climate change."

I wonder if the sentence "In the years 1961-2022 the productivity of the global agriculture sector declined by 21%, due to climate change." is strictly correct or might be misleading. I can only see the abstract of the paper where it comes from and there it says: "Our baseline model indicates that ACC has reduced global agricultural TFP by about 21% since 1961, a slowdown that is equivalent to losing the last 7 years of productivity growth. The effect is substantially more severe (a reduction of ~26–34%) in warmer regions such as Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean. We also find that global agriculture has grown more vulnerable to ongoing climate change." So that is not the same statement as the one provided in the Wikipedia article. I am asking because when I worked with a content expert on effects of climate change on agriculture this statement did not come up but instead we found that for some crops there was a gain, for others there was a reduction and this depended on the climatic region of the world. So the statement seems overly simplistic to me. EMsmile (talk) 09:09, 25 July 2022 (UTC)

Feel free to excerpt that section or do a better summary @EMsmile -- that section is not very mature, so could use a bit more thoughtful representation, Sadads (talk) 09:18, 25 July 2022 (UTC)

I'd like to but don't have time at present. I just want to flag that the sentence is likely wrong, an over-simplification. I find it problematic as it's the very first sentence of the article. So I think whoever added it should investigate this a bit further. EMsmile (talk) 09:22, 25 July 2022 (UTC)

I agree that this is misleading. Yields have increased dramatically (50-year period 1961-2011 animal product yields have increased by 163%, while crop yields have increased by 140% https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378015300327). While yields may have been higher without changes to the climate, this is uncertain and variable between locations. This overall context does not come across as currently phrased. PAlandus (talk) 13:22, 28 July 2022 (UTC)

Impressive rise of pageviews

This article has a very impressive rise of pageviews since its creation, from zero to about 1000 pageviews per day. That's very impressive. I assume that is because it is linked prominently from the main page of the Ukraine war page? Or what search terms are people likely to use to find this article? I wouldn't have typed "2022 food crises" into the Wikipedia search field to find it. We should also link it well with the 2007–2008 world food price crisis article (and be inspired by the structure and content of that page), as that's the major previous food price crisis, right? EMsmile (talk) 09:29, 25 July 2022 (UTC)

Yes, and "2010–2012 world food price crisis" PAlandus (talk) 13:23, 28 July 2022 (UTC)

Balance of content on "Causes"

The causes section currently lists 5 topics (Energy crisis; Russian invasion of Ukraine; Effects of climate change; Supply chain failures; and War in Yemen). The actual content is however dominated by climate change. The order they list (energy crisis/Ukraine/climate change) is appropriate, but the length each is dealt with is not. The emphasis on impact of climate change seems disproportionate to the impact. For example, https://www.fao.org/3/cc0868en/cc0868en.pdf suggests a 0.6% decline in cereal output since 2021 (and a great output than 2020). The energy (and associate fertilizer) price rises hardly has much text, but some evidence suggests it is a major contributor to the food price rises.

The evidence of supply chain failures is weak (and largely based a well known polemicist, George Monbiot) and the war in Yemen has only caused issues within that country, rather than the global food price increases that are the topic of the page. I would certainly remove the war in Yemen from 'Causes' and consider reworking or removing/renaming the 'supply chain failures'.

Additionally, protectionist measures implemented by some countries (most notably India) in response to food price rises appears to be entirely missing. PAlandus (talk) 14:41, 29 July 2022 (UTC)

I think these are very important points that PAlandus is raising here. It's a knee jerk reaction to make climate change squarely responsible for anything that goes wrong. In many cases when it comes to agriculture and food prices climate change just makes things worse but is not the prime culprit. I don't have time at the moment to work on this article myself but I think the people who set this article up or who've been working on it lately, should take these concerns into account and edit the article accordingly. EMsmile (talk) 09:10, 1 August 2022 (UTC)

A big missed issue is sanctions on Belarus, which normally supplies 20% of the world's potassium fertilizer (potash). People will say fertilizers are not sanctioned, but EU sanctions on trains, banks providing shipping insurance and bank payment systems effectively block exports via Baltic. Russia also usually exports potassium and NPK fertilisers and also has problems, despite the grain deal, especially with payments, which have to be done in cash dollars via a government shop in Istanbul.

If this isn't solved, it could be the 2022-2024 food frisis, and 2024 could be worst, as in 2023 there may still have been considerable phosphate (P) and potassium (K) in the soil from last year. Andyraytaylor (talk) 13:11, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

Hi Andyraytaylor are you able to include some of this in the article (with suitable references) if it's not in there yet? EMsmile (talk) 11:10, 8 May 2023 (UTC)