122
China Has Never Canceled This Many Shipments of US Wheat
(www.bloomberg.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
122 points (99.2% liked)
news
23231 readers
639 users here now
Welcome to c/news! Please read the Hexbear Code of Conduct and remember... we're all comrades here.
Rules:
-- PLEASE KEEP POST TITLES INFORMATIVE --
-- Overly editorialized titles, particularly if they link to opinion pieces, may get your post removed. --
-- All posts must include a link to their source. Screenshots are fine IF you include the link in the post body. --
-- If you are citing a twitter post as news please include not just the twitter.com in your links but also nitter.net (or another Nitter instance). There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/ or archive them as you would any other reactionary source using e.g. https://archive.today . Twitter screenshots still need to be sourced or they will be removed --
-- Mass tagging comm moderators across multiple posts like a broken markov chain bot will result in a comm ban--
-- Repeated consecutive posting of reactionary sources, fake news, misleading / outdated news, false alarms over ghoul deaths, and/or shitposts will result in a comm ban.--
-- Neglecting to use content warnings or NSFW when dealing with disturbing content will be removed until in compliance. Users who are consecutively reported due to failing to use content warnings or NSFW tags when commenting on or posting disturbing content will result in the user being banned. --
-- Using April 1st as an excuse to post fake headlines, like the resurrection of Kissinger while he is still fortunately dead, will result in the poster being thrown in the gamer gulag and be sentenced to play and beat trashy mobile games like 'Raid: Shadow Legends' in order to be rehabilitated back into general society. --
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Why doesn't America just use its Grain Belt to feed its people? Is it stupid?
One of the major arms of American imperialism is controlling food supply all over the world.
Just 2% of its population (plus uncountable immigrant workers) in the agricultural sector produces enough grain surplus to feed much of the world.
At the same time, the World Bank explicitly prohibits developing countries from achieving food self-sufficiency and demanded that they plant export crops instead to sell for cheap to Western countries.
Meanwhile, Western ag giants like ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus (the ABCD) have a monopoly of the global agricultural commodity trading and control much of the grain seeds provision across the world.
The combined effect is that developing countries will always have to rely on Western countries, especially the US, to import grains/seeds to achieve some level of food security. This is why Western sanctions is so dangerous for a lot of the countries because they can easily slide into famine without the ability to import food.
Russia has been changing some of the dynamics here as it had ramped up its grain production over the past 2 decades, turning itself from a net food importer (50% food import) to a net food exporter country under Putin. This allowed countries like China to obtain an alternative source of grains instead of relying on the US and other hostile Western countries alone. Still, this is still nowhere near breaking the domination of American imperialist control over the global food supply chain.
Do you have any book recommendations for learning more about this? Really anything about how the world bank or IMF function as an arm of imperialism would be much appreciated.
Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System by Raj Patel is a good start.
Boom, thank you!