India’s Heat Wave Could Worsen the Global Food Crisis – The Atlantic

Source: India’s Heat Wave Could Worsen the Global Food Crisis – The Atlantic  by Robinson  Meyer

For the past few days, a heat wave of mind-boggling scale and intensity has gripped South Asia. More than 1 billion people in India and Pakistan have endured daytime highs of 40 degrees Celsius, or 104 degrees Fahrenheit.

Delhi, the world’s second-largest city, has suffered through back-to-back days of 110-degree Fahrenheit heat. And Nawabshah, Pakistan—a city of nearly 230,000 people in the country’s desert south—came within half a degree of 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit), the temperature at which the human body starts to cook.

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Ukraine is still producing wheat. The problem is getting it out. 

When Russia invaded Ukraine, some 55.4 million tons of wheat—the countries’ combined total wheat production—seemed to hang in the balance. The two countries, with their famously productive soils, function as a bread basket for Europe, Asia, and northern Africa. (Ukraine’s blue-and-yellow flag is meant to suggest a golden field of grain waving beneath the sky.)  

Thankfully, the war has, so far, not been quite as catastrophic as feared on this measure. “Ukraine’s farmers are producing,” Tothova told me, although they’re obviously not achieving the same yields as before the war. “The problem in Ukraine will probably be how to get the stuff to the world market.”

More than 90 percent of Ukraine’s wheat goes out through its ports on the Black Sea. But Russia has blockaded those ports, meaning that Ukraine’s total commodity exports must travel by rail, barge, or truck. Ukraine used to ship 5 million tons of commodities out of its ports each month. Over land, the country can ship only about 500,000 tons a month, Tothova said.

That creates a problem for countries that have come to depend on Ukraine’s—or Russia’s—exports.