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Comment by csee | Hacker News Reader

I quickly googled what the annual wheat exports from Ukraine and Russia are and got a much bigger number than the tweet suggests.

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I googled as well. Ukraine exports were ~ 20 million tonnes. The tweet says the expected shortfall is ~ 7 million tonnes, probably because Ukraine is not expected to lose all of their production. If they did lose all 20 million, then the fraction would be 20 million / 778 million = 2.6%. Total production (including that consumed locally) is about 25 million, so if all of that were lost, the overall difference would be about 3.2%.

We need to also consider Russia's wheat exports. They've threatened protection measures on their wheat.

You might want to (much less quickly) figure out what percentage of their exports is affected by their war, how the war & sanctions affect transportation & trade partners, and what the end result of that is.

Nobody has stopped exports completely. Nobody has stopped planting wheat.

How much of the capacity is affected by:

- manpower shortages due to war

- infrastructure destruction (roads, ports, etc)

- cropland destruction

- higher fuel prices

- higher fertilizer prices

- regional weather fluctuations

I see many towns in Ukraine are destroyed or emptied of people. I don't suppose farms in those towns will be producing anything this year.

These are all good questions, and I'm not denying Ukraine is suffering.

What I'm saying is that they likely still will export wheat. The amount is the question. I'm saying that the question is harder (a lot harder) than a quick Internet search on what percentage of world wheat production comes from Ukraine.

Sure but that would lead to a low confidence estimate given the war has just started, it's not clear whether the ports will be captured, it's not clear whether the sowing season will be disrupted, and it's not clear whether Russia will engage in protectionism of wheat. A shortage of more than 3% is possible. The tweet should have highlighted that uncertainty instead of presenting the 0.9% figure as a near fact. They smuggled in the word "estimate" somewhere but they obscured the uncertainty.

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