When asked to describe war, Union General William T. Sherman noted that “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” Later, in a speech, Sherman did refine his easily forgettable dictum to the much shorter, impossible-to-forget: “War is hell.”
Others thought war to be “… politics by other means,” (Clausewitz) or “… a wanton waste of projectiles,” (Twain).
However you describe it, war is expensive. World War II, in 2020 dollars, cost $4 trillion and devoured 40 percent of U.S. GDP in 1945. To date, estimates of the total U.S. military, financial and humanitarian aid to Ukraine since its February 2022 invasion by Russia range from $75 billion to $110 billion.
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It’s extremely profitable, too. In 2023, Brown University estimated that the almost generation-long war in Afghanistan cost U.S. taxpayers $14 trillion, “with one-third to one-half of that total going to military contractors.”
Shooting wars aren’t the only type of warfare that’s costly, deadly and often without a winner. In Jan. 2022, the International Monetary Fund estimated the total cost of the COVID-19 pandemic would be at least $12.5 trillion.
The human side of that coin is just as large. On Aug. 2, the United Nations (UN) World Health Organization estimated total COVID-19 deaths worldwide now stand at 7 million.
COVID has other, less visible victims. In 2021 alone, the UN calculated the pandemic more than doubled the number of “people experiencing acute food insecurity” around the world from 135 million to 345 million.
Then, with global food aid programs already reeling under COVID, the Russian invasion of Ukraine struck another blow. U.S. wheat futures prices rocketed nearly 50% higher, from $7.50 per bu. to $11 per bu., as shipping and boycott threats ricocheted through global markets.
But even after the invasion-shaken markets settled into a less volatile, more predictable pattern, the number of food-threatened nations remained high and access to supplies continued to be threatened.
However, throughout the pandemic and Russian-Ukrainian war, one area of the global food system remained — and remains — well-fed and fat. According to a Greenpeace International February 2023 report, “The world’s biggest agribusiness corporations made more in billion-dollar profits since 2020 than the amount that the UN estimates could cover the basic needs of the world’s most vulnerable …”
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