Ukraine is at the latitude of Minnesota.
Ukraine has four seasons. It gets rain during the summer growing season. It has deep, rich soils. It is a breadbasket region, like the American Midwest.
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| World food growing regions |
Few people live where they cannot grow food: Deserts, the northern forests of Siberia and Canada, high altitude Tibet, the Arctic and Antarctic. There are anomalies. Ukraine is one of them, as is the American Upper Midwest and northward into Canada. They contain productive farmland with relatively low population density. Modern industrial agriculture requires less labor. Those areas export food.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports current information on the temperatures, rainfall, and growing conditions of farm regions of the world, including Ukraine.
The USDA gets down to granular detail linking specific Ukraine regions to their share of the country’s production of specific exportable commodities. Ukraine is a major wheat exporter. China grows 94 Kg. of wheat per person. The U.S. grows 192 Kg. Ukraine grows 618 Kg. of wheat per person.
Sunflower oil is a significant vegetable oil export commodity and Ukraine is in sunflower production zone. Note that they calculate both overall tonnage and production per person. The purpose is to assist farmers and exporters in anticipating market conditions in a world market.
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| Sunflowers |
Sunflower oil may not be high in the consciousness of American readers, but it is a significant import product for India. Ukraine is their major supplier. India's English language financial journal, The Economic Times, headlines:
And this:
The Ukraine conflict is deeply consequential in ways that Americans think about and those we don't. The invasion is connected to everything on earth.
I will close with a final map. There is one exception to the Ukraine-as-Minnesota climate parallel: Crimea. It dangles into the Black Sea and has a quasi-Mediterranean climate, not a continental one. Crimea is the most "Russian" part of Ukraine, a part whose population appeared willingly to rejoin Russia. It is linked to the rest of Ukraine by roads and a water pipeline. It wasn't physically connected to Russia at all until recently, when Russia built a bridge at Kerch. This map colors Crimea in brown. Those are fighting words. Maybe it should be colored beige. It is a sticking point in the conflict. The fate of the world may ride on whether Ukraine and Russia can work that out.
6 comments:
N.B. I think the Editor meant to write, “The USDA gets down to GRANULAR detail linking specific Ukraine regions….”
The Crimea has long been an international mosh pits. Almost two centuries since Russia, the U.K., France and the Turks fought there.
From your info I would equate Ukraine to the California Central Valley.
I don't think Putin invaded for sunflower oil.
Putin has handed the world a classic and tragic option - do nothing and give him everything he demands or prepare to be annihilated when Putin launch nukes at our Capitols. Sanctions and incremental wrist slaps of the worlds autocrats only convinces dictators like Putin to proceed regardless. Putin, and Xi and Teheran and Kim conspire to defy any and all attempts to rein them in. At least, at this moment the world's free governments have an opportunity to say - STOP or we all will stop you. A free and democratic Ukraine is too important to the world to allow this invasion by Russia on its sovereign neighbor to go unpunished and repelled. Step one - Remove Russia from the UN Security council. [The Soviet Union is the signature and has dissolved along with our treaty obligations.] Step two - give Ukraine the aircraft it needs to repel Russia. Step three - prepare for a decade of kinetic conflict. Or give up and surrender the worlds free and sovereign nations to autocratic rule by the most ruthless autocrats and dictators.
Peter's blogs this weekend make graphic just what is at stake and why it is so important the world resists and repels Russia with all its might.
The free world didn’t stand up to Hitler at first. As a result, it had to stand up to him later at a much higher cost.
Those who refuse to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.
Razom nas bahato!
There is pressure on the U.S. and NATO to intervene in Ukraine militarily and put us at risk of a nuclear war. Fortunately, so far cooler heads have prevailed. It would be more than a tragedy if our need for instant gratification made us too impatient to allow sanctions to do their work. It would be a holocaust.
When Hitler was taking over Europe, they didn’t even have nukes and the resulting war killed an estimated 70-85 million people. Let’s not go there.
Yes, and we need to remember the US history in World War II, and since:
The US bombed civilian targets in Japan to terrorize civilians.
The US is the only country to drop nuclear weapons on another country.
The US government has repeatedly lied to the public to get involved militarily on other wars (in Asia and the Middle East).
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