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China Has Never Canceled This Many Shipments of US Wheat
(www.bloomberg.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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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!