Hormuz closure could trigger 'agrifood shock', price crisis within a year

mmooreds about 4 hours ago 26 commentsRead Article on reuters.com

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Discussion (26 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

jalapenoj•about 2 hours ago

It’s a sacrifice israel is willing to make.

hersko•about 1 hour ago

Here are two articles Reuters wrote about how the war in Ukraine was going to do something similar in 2022[1][2]. Make of this what you will.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/graphics/UKRAINE-CRISIS/FOOD/zjvqkgo... [2] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-war-ukraine-bla...

delecti•about 1 hour ago

Also worth noting that a deal was worked out a few months later, before things could get bad. https://www.npr.org/2022/07/22/1112880942/ukraine-grain-expo...

gambiting•about 1 hour ago

And like other articles pointed out, wealthy western countries will always just outbid poorer countries for their food. No one in Germany, Poland or the UK was going to go hungry without the grain or fertilizer from Ukraine - but it does mean we have a much tighter supply than before, and poorer countries got quite literally priced out. Combined with the reduction of foreign aid(not just by US) there is a humanitarian crisis going on in a lot of places as a direct consequence of this. This is "just" going to make the existing problems worse.

martythemaniak•about 2 hours ago

Tough problem! Perhaps the US commentariat should listen to Thomas Friedman's wisdom and start loudly hectoring the rest of the world to step up and fix this problem.

bdcravens•about 1 hour ago

Or we could just accept defeat and leave.

rasHfd•about 2 hours ago

Doesn't matter.

The IRGC wants the blockade for self-preservation among its own population to show it is resisting "The West".

Russia wants the blockade because it profits from higher oil and fertilizer prices. Also it wants to tie up U.S. military resources in Iran.

The U.S. elites and Trump want the blockade to subjugate the EU and China and sell their oil and natural gas. (The meek recent Senate protest means nothing. If the elites didn't want the war, the House and the Senate would have 2/3rd majorities to stop it.)

None of these autocratic countries care about their own populations. Trump has said so explicitly many times.

So all world populations as well as the EU and Chinese industries are being fleeced. It would be cheaper to bribe the IRGC to lift the blockade while publicly maintaining the anti-Western stance. Then the U.S. would have to lift their blockade.

But the EU is watching like scared children and China builds new Siberian pipelines.

marcosdumay•about 2 hours ago

> The IRGC wants the blockade for self-preservation

No. The preservation was all done by the US attacking them. Everything on their part is just well motivated defense.

asfqrt•about 1 hour ago

How are you going to discuss geopolitics here if attempts at explaining the stalling of the U.S. and Russia to defuse the conflict are censored.

Instead, the "Israel controls the world" narrative, repeated incidentally by many Western and pro-Russian outlets on Twitter and YouTube is the top comment.

So probably this censored comment is correct but outside the Overton Window.

iugtmkbdfil834•about 2 hours ago

<< Trump has said so explicitly many times.

Well, based merely on the past 3 months, I am not certain he is a useful way to measure truth or evaluate anything as fact.

That said, in somewhat broad strokes, I don't disagree with the gist of your post.

rainworld•about 1 hour ago

You, as many do, forgot to mention the root cause: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/us-iran-war-request-israel...

> The meek recent Senate protest means nothing. If the elites didn't want the war, the House and the Senate would have 2/3rd majorities to stop it.

Yesterday’s AIPAC-driven ouster of Rep. Thomas Massie should tell you why no one is trying to stop this and who these “elites” you speak of answer to.

> The IRGC wants the blockade for self-preservation among its own population to show it is resisting "The West".

They are not showing off. They are actively and successfully resisting “The West”. Which could only sustain 5 weeks of active hostilities, got nowhere, hurt its position in the ME severely, but still cannot concede. Which brings us back to the root cause.

234k-awsh•24 minutes ago

Of course if Israel is willing to take the blame because its reputation is at an all time low anyway, the Trump administration will happily use it as an excuse for being dragged into the war.

hersko•about 1 hour ago

> AIPAC-driven ouster

Yeah, i definitely had nothing to do with him accusing his party of protecting pedophiles and repeatedly voting with the left to block Trumps agenda. It must have been the jews.

rainworld•about 1 hour ago

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/17/massie-aipac-record... It literally was. And wait till you find out you find out who Epstein et al. were working for.

PenguinCoder•about 1 hour ago

> None of these autocratic countries care about their own populations. Trump has said so explicitly many times.

Going to need a better source than a habitual liar.

amalcon•33 minutes ago

In legal terms, one would call this a "statement against interest". If a politician says he does not care one bit about the welfare his constituents, it is reasonable for those constituents to take him at his word no matter how untrustworthy he is. It only hurts him if we believe it.

Iranian negotiators probably shouldn't believe him, because it's not against interest in that context. There probably just aren't any on Hacker News.

throw-the-towel•about 1 hour ago

Correction: Trump probably isn't even a liar, but a bullshitter. A liar, at the very least, understands whatever he's saying is not true; a bullshitter doesn't care at all about the relationship between his words and the truth, he just makes noise.