If you ask a metrologist you will get this answer. But from what I’ve heard from eu farmers are: Russian fertilisers and gas dependence have caused quite a blow to the market, it will need time to normalise.
Not trying to downplay extreme weather though!
boudin 3 hours ago [-]
That's part of the equation for sure but extreme weather events have a massive impact where I live. Talking to producers, they are losing way more of their production way more frequently due to intense rain or dry events. As an exemple, someone who manages orchards was telling me that the norm now is to lose 1 year of harvest every 5 years when it was every 10 years 20 years ago.
Talking with small scale organic veg growers who are less dependent on russian oil, managing weather events is the hardest part of their job. Currently, the soil is as dry as it usually is end of august where i am.
worldsayshi 3 hours ago [-]
> the norm now is to lose 1 year of harvest every 5 years when it was every 10 years 20 years ago.
That sounds apocalyptic given that these things have only just begun.
bostik 24 minutes ago [-]
> apocalyptic
Bingo. Wars are already expanding, and the world is preparing for more. With food production suffering from climate change impacts, we are witnessing famine gaining ground in real time. The breed of politicians in power are doing their best to give pestilence a newfound hold on populace at large.
And the fourth horseman is comfortably trotting in the wake of the other three.
I see the war in Ukraine as one of them. They have huge areas of farm land, valuable in times where climate change makes farming impossible in other regions. And many big companies and countries are already invested in there. You can already see how dependent some countries are on this base on the different price spikes. (While the question remains if farm products should be traded on stock markets).
phtrivier 1 hours ago [-]
I can also be interpreted as an "energy-transition" war, given how the territories captured by Russia "just happen" to contain the mines... [1]
So if we stop buying oil & gas from Russia, and instead buy batteries made in part out of "Russian" minerals from Eastern-Ukraine... yaay progress, I guess ?
There are massive oil, gas and metal reserves on eastern Ukraine. Sure, russia has those too but as a nation they are the very definition of greedy. When you have parts of their mafia state fighting for a bigger grab of money and power, you end up with such wars.
dzink 30 minutes ago [-]
Cherries, Apricots, and Peaches produced no fruit this year in the Balkans (and possibly elsewhere in Europe), due to an early winter warm followed by a frost that destroyed all blooms. That will likely impact a lot of european canning and food producers.
luckys 4 hours ago [-]
In the little corner of Europe where I live food became more noticeably expensive with the Ukraine war. Not everything but a number of items. At one point, the price of olive oil was raised because vegetable oil had to be cheaper than olive oil!
Ukraine is the largest exporter of sunflower oil with Russia being #2. They are still #1 as of 2023 [1] so the war appears not to have completely interrupted supply but may have made it more expensive to distribute. WSJ reports that the war's effect on sunflower oil is causing a rise in price of all cooking oils.
We're talking about mainly 4 countries in the Mediterranean Sea.
The way I see it is that while it's true that there is an issue with the weather, they increased the prices in 2022 due to old high-demand/low-offer law (other cheaper oil not available, buy whatever is there: olive oil). The prices never decreased though, or if they did, it's unnoticeable. This pattern I have seen multiple times in my life: once companies realize people are going to pay for something for a certain price, why reduce it?
luckys 3 hours ago [-]
Portugal. You would have to live here I guess. It was about 2 years ago and I don't have any sources to give you. Ask the locals if you know any.
Olive oil may be more expensive in general now because of poor harvests but at the time local production had been good and there was no reason to raise the price. The rationale? I guess it was profit.
graemep 24 minutes ago [-]
> at the time local production had been good
Ye,s but prices are not just local. In general these are world prices as it can easily be imported or exported. Even more so within the EU single market which IS your national market.
On top of that its entirely normal for the prices of products that can substitute for each other to move together. If one oil goes up in price so will all the others. This is market forces acting as expected.
mk89 3 hours ago [-]
There was a huge spike in demand, due to the lack of cheaper alternatives.
Sadly enough, the prices have stayed the same, although the demand has very likely normalized, now that people can buy "again" sunflower and other vegetable oil.
nudgeOrnurture 2 hours ago [-]
have you been on the grounds of the olive oil producers? they had to increase prices because crisis talk and civil conflicts increased prices elsewhere. even unrelated prices cause increases up the graphs in all directions. it's mostly lies, of course, but they catch up.
don't take my word on it, obviously, but the math checks out "if you follow the money". essentially, logistical cost increases as well as oil and insurance prices were the determining factors, not extreme weather. despite zero change in the scarcity of any of the factors. (they found more oil etc)
crisis talk was also the reason for increased demand in some countries as idiots started to stock up and panic buy. I remember buying flour at a local producer and she said "they are all fucking crazy, nothing changes". the Russians were still stuck for days in front of the border in a long convoy, wahahaha, according to the news.
aivisol 3 hours ago [-]
Can confirm this. I think it was sunflower oil which went through the roof when war started not vegetable though.
mk89 3 hours ago [-]
As well as rapeseed oil. Here in Germany it reached the prices of olive oil, which was insane.
Kichererbsen 2 hours ago [-]
(canola oil i think is what americans might know it as. or something similar)
stormdennis 25 minutes ago [-]
Yes, with the 'can' in canola being the first 3 letters of Canada.
They though up the name as they reckoned the name rapeseed was problematic from a marketing point of view.
I've heard that like all oils that require extensive processing canola/rapeseed oil is not good for you as it contains the wrong sort of fatty acids as a result of that processing.
Olive oil, lard, butter, coconut and ghee are all far healthier.
I do not understand all the relativations here: If we crash the climate, we destroy the foundations for living on this planet, at least for most of us (billions). Sure, the current question is why we suddenly have none for weapons and even mightier AI while this would better be spend to get away from fossil fuels.
octo888 2 hours ago [-]
Makes you wonder if these climate-driven food shocks would have happened if COVID/ZIRP ending hadn't ...
Are there any comparable periods of weather extremes resulting in such widespread price hikes?
daft_pink 50 minutes ago [-]
It’s just inflation to be honest.
seydor 46 minutes ago [-]
olive oil price is back down now, but the biggest problem with it is expensive workers , as it is labor intensive, and despite the inflow of illegal immigrants to south europe.
FirmwareBurner 39 minutes ago [-]
>despite the inflow of illegal immigrants to south europe
Why "despite"? How many people who move illegally to Europe want to go work hard labor on farms if they can have easier avenues of making money?
You can't fix the famously perpetual "muh labor shortage" with open borders to illegals, if those people don't want those jobs to begin with. That's like leaving your door open to your house, hoping that from all those people who walk in, someone might want to be your maid for cheap, and not just eat your food and walk out.
From what I read in newspapers, most farm workers at least in DACH region tend to be Romanians, which are EU citizens and in Scandinavia they tend to be Asians on legal work visas so all legal workers who wanted those jobs.
What is particularly interesting is the spike in prices of beef. If climate extremes are causing food price shocks one would think that the beef price spike is caused by feed price shocks.
Feed prices are down at 2019 levels. And most cattle farmers are bitching that their wholesale prices are down. The fed data here seems to be MOSTLY from the processors and only some of it (the data with lower prices) from the larger market.
I dont doubt that there are shocks to the market, but it looks like there is a lot of gouging going on that is a hang over from the pandemic.
disgruntledphd2 24 minutes ago [-]
It's energy plus food. Fertiliser is made from gas (generally) so there's a double hit. First feed prices go up, then fertiliser prices go up, then beef prices go up.
We really (as a species) need to get off oil based stuff if we want to reduce inflation over the longer term (and for all the other climate based reasons too).
vixen99 2 hours ago [-]
Interesting that this is happening in concert with "a persistent and widespread increase of growing season integrated LAI (greening) over 25% to 50% of the global vegetated area, whereas less than 4% of the globe shows decreasing LAI (browning)."
The paper suggests "CO2 fertilization effects explain most of the greening trends in the tropics, whereas climate change resulted in greening of the high latitudes and the Tibetan Plateau. LCC contributed most to the regional greening observed in southeast China and the eastern United States. "
Not trying to downplay extreme weather though!
Talking with small scale organic veg growers who are less dependent on russian oil, managing weather events is the hardest part of their job. Currently, the soil is as dry as it usually is end of august where i am.
That sounds apocalyptic given that these things have only just begun.
Bingo. Wars are already expanding, and the world is preparing for more. With food production suffering from climate change impacts, we are witnessing famine gaining ground in real time. The breed of politicians in power are doing their best to give pestilence a newfound hold on populace at large.
And the fourth horseman is comfortably trotting in the wake of the other three.
So if we stop buying oil & gas from Russia, and instead buy batteries made in part out of "Russian" minerals from Eastern-Ukraine... yaay progress, I guess ?
[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-ukraines-mineral-res...
[1] - https://oec.world/en/profile/hs/sunflower-seed-or-safflower-... [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rtWDmo0rKg
The way I see it is that while it's true that there is an issue with the weather, they increased the prices in 2022 due to old high-demand/low-offer law (other cheaper oil not available, buy whatever is there: olive oil). The prices never decreased though, or if they did, it's unnoticeable. This pattern I have seen multiple times in my life: once companies realize people are going to pay for something for a certain price, why reduce it?
Olive oil may be more expensive in general now because of poor harvests but at the time local production had been good and there was no reason to raise the price. The rationale? I guess it was profit.
Ye,s but prices are not just local. In general these are world prices as it can easily be imported or exported. Even more so within the EU single market which IS your national market.
On top of that its entirely normal for the prices of products that can substitute for each other to move together. If one oil goes up in price so will all the others. This is market forces acting as expected.
Sadly enough, the prices have stayed the same, although the demand has very likely normalized, now that people can buy "again" sunflower and other vegetable oil.
don't take my word on it, obviously, but the math checks out "if you follow the money". essentially, logistical cost increases as well as oil and insurance prices were the determining factors, not extreme weather. despite zero change in the scarcity of any of the factors. (they found more oil etc)
crisis talk was also the reason for increased demand in some countries as idiots started to stock up and panic buy. I remember buying flour at a local producer and she said "they are all fucking crazy, nothing changes". the Russians were still stuck for days in front of the border in a long convoy, wahahaha, according to the news.
Are there any comparable periods of weather extremes resulting in such widespread price hikes?
Why "despite"? How many people who move illegally to Europe want to go work hard labor on farms if they can have easier avenues of making money?
You can't fix the famously perpetual "muh labor shortage" with open borders to illegals, if those people don't want those jobs to begin with. That's like leaving your door open to your house, hoping that from all those people who walk in, someone might want to be your maid for cheap, and not just eat your food and walk out.
From what I read in newspapers, most farm workers at least in DACH region tend to be Romanians, which are EU citizens and in Scandinavia they tend to be Asians on legal work visas so all legal workers who wanted those jobs.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/categories
What is particularly interesting is the spike in prices of beef. If climate extremes are causing food price shocks one would think that the beef price spike is caused by feed price shocks.
Feed prices are down at 2019 levels. And most cattle farmers are bitching that their wholesale prices are down. The fed data here seems to be MOSTLY from the processors and only some of it (the data with lower prices) from the larger market.
I dont doubt that there are shocks to the market, but it looks like there is a lot of gouging going on that is a hang over from the pandemic.
We really (as a species) need to get off oil based stuff if we want to reduce inflation over the longer term (and for all the other climate based reasons too).
The paper suggests "CO2 fertilization effects explain most of the greening trends in the tropics, whereas climate change resulted in greening of the high latitudes and the Tibetan Plateau. LCC contributed most to the regional greening observed in southeast China and the eastern United States. "
https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3004