James Stout

So even though on the one hand, right, the actual price that consumers are paying is going up, right?

and the cost to produce the rice is also going up, the actual price at which these people can sell the rice is going down.

And this is a fucking nightmare.

It means that crops aren't getting planted.

It means that crops are also just rotting in the fields because there's no way to sell and move them.

This is causing really, really significant concerns that we are going to be, you know, like we are looking over the coming months at a kind of agricultural catastrophe.

where you're starting to see sort of projections of people going, oh, God, like, hey, what if people simply stop exporting food?

There's a great quote in this New York Times article from a guy who's a senior fellow in food security at Singapore's ISEAS where he says, quote, complex systems have a habit of creating wicked problems.

The way that like capitalist markets interact with food shortages is a complete fucking nightmare.

And this is something that we have seen that has caused famines all over the world, is that once you get into the point where food genuinely becomes scarce, which is not quite the point where we're at now, we're in the beginning of the process by which this could happen, right?

The part of the process we're in right now is these farmers who also, by the way, and this is also very important, these rice farmers are not operating on particularly high margins, right?

they are not very wealthy.

When I say low margins, right, they are not making all that much money.

And so, you know, being unable to sell your rice, you're being forced to sell it at an extremely low price.

And then having your production costs rise because your cost of fertilizer is skyrocketing is how these things effectively go under.

If this stuff continues, this is how you get waves of people being forced off their land because they simply can't afford

to do the farming anymore, right?

But then, you know, you also have sort of, in some sense, you have the reverse of this in other places where if you look at what's happening in India, we talked about this on an executive disorder a few weeks back, you know, like a bunch of the ceramics industry, it's just like shut down and like 400,000 people are out of work from this.

And this is causing those people to, okay, like what do you do when you can't get work in sort of urban industrial centers as you go back to a lot of the rural places where these people are from?

But, you know, the thing about oil, right, is that oil price increase is something that hits people across the board.