Food Shortages

Lately, concerns have been raised about grocery stores’ shelves being empty. These stores are not getting their shelves stocked because of the Russia and Ukraine war. The location you buy your groceries depends on how much of a shortage they have, such as what region you live in. Another critical factor to the scarcity is still the pandemic. Grocery stores say the Omicron variant is affecting employees from working. 

With stores being closed, the food goes bad, and which has affected grocery stores. Worker shortages are also very high right now because stores are reopening. Though lately workers’ pay has been rising since Covid happened, more workers want to go back to work. Grocery stores are trying to get more benefits for employees so they will want to work longer and more at their business. Hopefully, stores get the employees they need to benefit from their work environment in the next month or so.

If you go to your local grocery store, don’t expect there to be a lot of meat. There are supposed to be shortages in meat because of manufacturing plant labor causing most of the issues. Factories closing because of Covid-19 caused many poultry items and eggs to get destroyed before turning into the meat. Then there was a terrible avian flu outbreak that has been going on since 2015. This outbreak affected the chicken markets, which is when an outbreak of flu affects birds, it can affect any live bird. 

Many crops are imported into the U.S., such as corn, and other crops will only harvest half of what was produced last year. Since the war started, Ukraine decided to ban wheat exports in the previous month so they could secure supplies for themselves. They are terrified of not being prepared or not having enough food for themselves while this war is happening. 

As the energy prices get higher, some Western nations have to print more money to buy supplies. This could cause much more shortages in food resources in the poorer countries. Putin (Rusiians president) has explained that Russia probably won’t export their food to other countries because they are hostile towards it. That is another reason we aren’t getting food sores from some places because they think we are their enemies. Russia supplies almost 17% of global wheat and Ukraine provides 12% of grain, and 17% of corn. Without these two, there will be significant shortages in the global supplies for wheat foods or just wheat  “We will have to be more careful about food supplies abroad, especially carefully monitor the exports to countries hostile to us,” Putin tells reporters.

No one knows how long these worker shortages or food shortages will last. But if these imports of wheat and corn don’t get exported to other countries, they will affect other countries. Also, if they start to raise the price for these exports, many countries will stop buying simply because they have to pay more and they don’t have enough money. Putin will keep everyone updated on imports and how much the price will rise to get these imports as soon as he figures out what is happening during this war.