@Merijn 'Netanyahu is a mass murderer' Knibbe
51.7K posts
@Merijn 'Netanyahu is a mass murderer' Knibbe
@MerijnKnibbe
Economic historian, ´anti-fascist/Antifa´, statistician, outdoor guide, father. De Kift and El Greco. Favourite epoch 1890-1930.
@GideonvMeijeren #debat #vaccineren Hahah hoe hij Bosma aanpakt is wel veel te mooi. Echt heel scherp zoals we van Gideon gewend zijn
Economics is - by a long shot - the most politically balanced academic discipline, according to a LLM study that scored the political skew of academic journal articles. It still leans left-of-center but not hegemonically so like the others (higher score = more left wing)
On March 12, India formally asked China for emergency urea to keep its fertilizer plants running. On March 16, China halted NPK fertilizer blend exports and extended its phosphate suspension through August. Read that sequence again. The world’s most populous nation asked the world’s largest fertilizer producer for help. The response was a lockdown. This is the second trap. The first trap is Hormuz. One-third of global seaborne fertilizer trade physically blocked. Transit collapsed 97 percent. Gulf urea, ammonia, and sulfur stranded behind mines, drones, and an insurance market that has fractured beyond repair. The second trap is China. Beijing looked at the Hormuz crisis, calculated that Gulf sulfur (over half of China’s imports) would not arrive, and made the rational decision to protect 1.4 billion of its own people first. Strategic sulfur reserves activated. Commercial nitrogen and phosphate stocks released early. NPK blends locked down for export. Phosphate banned through August. The 725 million tonne grain target in the 15th Five-Year Plan does not bend for India’s Kharif season. Nobody should be surprised. This is exactly what China did in 2022 when the Ukraine shock hit. It is what China will always do. And it is what every government with the capacity to hoard will do when the molecules run short. The crisis does not produce global solidarity. It produces national triage. And in national triage, the countries with domestic production and strategic reserves survive. The countries that depend on imports from those countries do not. India has 17.7 million tonnes of fertilizer stockpiled, up 36.5 percent year-over-year. That is a buffer, not a solution. Plants are running at 60 percent capacity. The subsidy bill has been revised to 1.86 lakh crore rupees, over 40 percent of the entire subsidy budget, with urea sold at 242 rupees per bag against international prices many times higher. If Skymet’s 60% probability of below-normal monsoon materializes during Kharif, India faces a food production challenge of a severity not seen since the crisis that prompted the Green Revolution. Bangladesh has shut 4 to 5 of six urea factories. Boro rice season is underway with no domestic nitrogen. Pakistan’s debt service consumes 81 percent of tax revenue. Egypt feeds 69 million on bread subsidies at prices it never budgeted while owing $28 billion in external debt. Southeast Asia faces granular urea above $700 per tonne. Sri Lanka, the country that already proved what happens when fertilizer vanishes, faces 15 to 30 percent yield risk from the same import dependence that collapsed its rice output 40% in 2021. Now map the sulfur cascade that almost nobody is tracking. Roughly half of global seaborne sulfur trade is Gulf-sourced. Sulfuric acid is the chemical required to convert raw phosphate rock into plant-available fertilizer. Without Gulf sulfur, phosphate processing breaks globally. Morocco’s OCP, the world’s largest phosphate exporter, imports roughly 3.7 million tonnes of Gulf sulfur annually. China imports over 4 million tonnes. The sulfur shortage does not just constrain nitrogen supply. It simultaneously fractures the phosphate chain, creating the first simultaneous disruption of all three primary crop nutrients since the Haber-Bosch process was industrialized. Two forces are now converging on the global food system from opposite directions. Iran blocks the molecules physically. China blocks them administratively. Neither is acting irrationally. Both are executing national survival logic. And the countries caught between them, the ones with no domestic production, no strategic reserves, and no fiscal capacity to compete on the spot market, absorb the full force of both. 318 mn people were at crisis-level hunger before either trap snapped shut. The math does not require malice to produce catastrophe. It only requires geography, chemistry, and a planting calendar that waits for nobody. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…
BREAKING: Officials in Cuba report an island-wide blackout in the country of some 11 million people as its energy and economic crises deepen. apnews.com/article/cuba-p…
