Miller Magazine Issue: 149 May 2022

70 COVER STORY MILLER / MAY 2022 “Nothing has really happened unless it's been described.” - Virginia Woolf We have been raised with the knowledge that the price of grain is determined by the intersection of supply and demand, which are affected by many factors, such as weather, cost of inputs and other aspects, and that supply and demand balance can and will eventually be achieved by world price adjustments in or- der to facilitate logistics and wade off eventual imbalances. In the past decennia we have been lulled into complacency by a rela- tively well balanced supply-demand situation in the grains markets, and Black Sea became the new lauded granary of the world. Will the Biblical seven years of plenty make place for the ‘seven years of famine’? Will ‘all the good years be forgotten’? On 4 May 2022, the Global Network Against Food Crises released the latest numbers on people fac- ing acute hunger and malnutrition in crisis-prone countries in a new edition of the Global Report on Food Crises. This year’s edition indicates alarm- ing increases in the number of people in the most severe phases of acute food insecurity, recording unprecedented levels of hunger worldwide. The outlook for global acute food insecurity in 2022 is expected to de- teriorate even further as compared to 2021, even though the number of population in crisis or worse nearly doubled between 2016 and 2021. Notably, the ongoing war in Ukraine is likely to exacerbate the already severe 2022 acute food in- security forecasts included in this report, given that the repercussions of the war on global food, ener- gy and fertilizer prices and supplies have not yet been factored into most country-level projection analyses. According to International Grains Council In the past decennia we have been lulled into complacency by a relatively well balanced supply-demand situation in the grains markets, and Black Sea became the new lauded granary of the world. Will the Biblical seven years of plenty make place for the ‘seven years of famine’? Will ‘all the good years be forgotten’? Fighting for resources Natalja Skuratovic Senior Sales Manager CIS CESCO EPC GmbH