If only they could have benefited from some sort of multi-national agricultural funding scheme.
An occasional bad season is one thing–a wise older farmer told me a long time back that “the bad years are the price of admission.” However we’ve had a few bad seasons in a row with no end in sight.
Public impact is the problem. Right now the issues this causes are most visible to most people in “non-essential” foodstuffs. What happens when it becomes systemic and global for staple foods?
Here in Australia they hope for 1 in 10 to be exceptional and a few to break even. The rest are a loss to be endured.
That’s challenging, my heart goes out to them.
Brought back memories of this article, well worth a read
https://theintercept.com/2023/10/29/william-nordhaus-climate-economics/
Ignorance of systems has its way of plowing forward, juggernaut-like. Nordhaus has opined that agriculture is “the part of the economy that is sensitive to climate change,” but because it accounts for just 3 percent of national output, climate disruption of food production cannot produce a “very large effect on the U.S. economy.” It is unfortunate for his calculations that agriculture is the foundation on which the other 97 percent of GDP depends. Without food — strange that one needs to reiterate this — there is no economy, no society, no civilization. Yet Nordhaus treats agriculture as indifferently fungible.
