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Rising food prices are adding to hunger crises in countries with already-high levels of food insecurity and drought, such as Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia. They are also disproportionately affecting people in Middle Eastern countries such as Egypt, Lebanon, and Yemen, which rely on Russia and Ukraine for most of their wheat. The number of food-insecure people in the world has risen from an estimated 768 million in 2020 to 869 million in May 2022.

Many countries outside of the Black Sea region export wheat, and about 30 percent of the world’s wheat is in storage, so there’s enough wheat to feed everyone in the world. But if wheat producers continue to put export restrictions in place, experts warn that prices will continue to rise to unmanageable levels and more people will go hungry.

What do export restrictions mean for global hunger?

On May 13, India announced export restrictions on wheat, but noted that it would honor pre-ban commitments and still accept requests from governments dealing with food insecurity. In the wake of the announcement, there was an immediate price spike (although that has since abated somewhat in the past week).

The worry about India’s move is that it could contribute to the world’s looming food crisis. But the biggest problem isn’t necessarily the direct long-term effects of a ban on global prices — that could, in fact, be negligible. While India is a major global wheat producer, most of the wheat it produces is consumed locally; India accounted for less than 1 percent of global wheat exports in 2020.

Rather, experts worry about the example it sets for other producers. Historically, when countries, particularly large global players, institute export bans, other countries follow suit. This leads to higher global prices due to decreased supply, which generate panic about shortages, which then sparks a vicious cycle of price-raising and more widespread hunger as food-insecure countries struggle to afford food for their populations.

In a previous global food crisis in 2007-’08, which drought and fuel prices also contributed to, insulating trade policy changes are estimated to have led to almost half of the global rice price increase and about a third of the global wheat price increase.

In our current crisis, export restrictions rose at the beginning of Covid-19, kicking off a period of price spikes, and have been on the rise again this year in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It’s estimated that pre-India trade restrictions contributed to about one-sixth, or 7 percentage points, of the global wheat price rise. For people living in poverty, an increase of that size can be catastrophic.

Sam Panthaky/AFP via Getty Images
Workers stand next to a heap of wheat being loaded onto a ship at the Deendayal Port Authority seaport at Kandla, India, on May 18.

In March, Chris Barrett, a professor at Cornell who researches food security, told me about economist Kym Anderson’s comparison of export bans to people standing up during a sports match at a stadium. At first, the people standing can see better, but then everyone follows suit and no one ends up benefiting.

“In the end, nobody’s getting a better experience of the match,” Barrett said, “but there’s a lot of unnecessary conflict and unnecessary expenditure of energy to deliver an inferior result, and that’s where we wind up with export bans. Export bans don’t accomplish much, if anything, and nothing lasting for countries that implement them, but they cause real problems for others.”

The potential implications of India’s export restrictions

Economists are critical of India’s restrictions (its exceptions notwithstanding), and think that the negative impacts for both global markets and domestic producers could be similar to what we’ve seen in the past, even if it’s not directly through the loss of Indian wheat.

Communication and perception end up being a big part of the story. If people think there’s scarcity, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy; if countries say they’ll do one thing and instead do another, it also may lead to panic. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced in April, “We already have enough food for our people but our farmers seem to have made arrangements to feed the world,” offering to fill in some of the export gaps left by the war in Ukraine.

“The exuberance about the ability to feed the world was not realistic,” Siraj Hussain, an expert on agriculture and rural economy at Arcus Policy Research, told me over email.

While export bans are purportedly put in place to help people domestically, there’s little evidence they have this effect. In the case of India, export bans historically have ended up hurting farmer incomes by creating an unpredictable market environment and cutting off their access to markets that will give them higher prices. Those bans may help domestic consumers for a while — at least until everyone starts standing up in the stadium — but they end up hurting domestic farmers. Given that over 40 percent of people in India are employed in agriculture, that’s a lot of people who could get hurt.

Export restrictions are easy to implement because they don’t cost money, and it “sends a strong policy message of, ‘we protect you and keep the food at home,’” said David Laborde, a researcher at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) who runs their Food and Fertilizer Export Restrictions Tracker. But “the reality is keeping food at home doesn’t mean it ends in the plate of the people who need it.”

Sajjad Hussain/AFP via Getty Images
A laborer works inside a mill producing refined wheat flour in Khanna, India, on May 18.

To protect farmers and others at risk of hunger at a volatile time, governments can instead increase social protection such as cash transfers or school feeding programs, or raise the minimum support price for farmers. (India is providing social protection by continuing a food subsidy program reaching about 800 million people that was effective at fighting poverty during Covid-19.)

The stringency of India’s restrictions will determine how much they ultimately affect global food prices. India has already announced that it will allow exports registered before May 13, and that it will continue to trade with food-insecure countries, particularly in the region. If India in practice ends up exporting basically what it would have anyway, then the export restrictions themselves shouldn’t have too many long-term price implications for the world. “For me the India ban is much more a communication problem and bad example than something that will traumatize markets,” Laborde said.

Laborde noted that Argentina, another major global wheat supplier, would be the next to watch given its history of export restrictions. Negative knock-on effects extend not only to global producers, but also to regional producers who might be inspired to ban exports. Tanzania and Uganda, for example, aren’t big players in the global wheat market, but to a country like South Sudan already suffering from high food insecurity and conflict, a ban from those two countries could be devastating.

There also may be negative longer-term effects of export restrictions for countries that implement them. The restrictions hit the credibility “of India as a reliable supplier of anything in global markets,” wrote agriculture researchers Ashok Gulati and Sanchit Gupta in the Indian Express.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) doesn’t have disciplinary measures against export bans, Barrett said, because in 1994, when the protocols were written, it was more worried about import bans. Changes to international trade policy may be possible as early as June, when the WTO’s postponed 12th Ministerial Conference is set to take place.

In the meantime, however, a food crisis looms. One big thing countries can do to prevent it is resist the temptation to restrict food exports amid the global economy’s gyrations.

After the backlash to Dave Chappelle’s transphobic 2021 Netflix special The Closer, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said he believed in “artistic expression,” and that his stance toward Chappelle’s comedy hadn’t changed — implying that trans people would just have to get over it. That seems to be the platform’s party line on transphobia. The company’s long-term investment in Gervais includes releasing shows he stars in, like Derek and After Life, and reportedly paying him $40 million in total for his most recent pair of comedy specials. Humanity, released to Netflix in 2018, likewise reeked of transphobia. In SuperNature, the level of transphobia goes several degrees further than Humanity and even further than Chappelle’s seeming fixation on pronouns and genitalia. Gervais parrots numerous ideas that form the backbone of transphobic TERF ideology, then blames transgender audiences for being mad.

Gervais, like many other comedians of late, has spent his last several cycles on the comedy circuit reacting over and over again to so-called “woke” culture and comedy, as if the concept of comedy that refuses to punch down is so egregious all he can do is continually react to it, then react to the reactions to his reactions.

This time around, having been through repeated backlash over his previous offenses, he’s at pains to explain the structure of his comedy — to explain to us why he holds the comedic high ground over his invisible future catcallers. See, he stops to inform his audience, the joke he’s about to tell isn’t offensive because he’s being ironic. Now he’s being metaphorical. Now he’s using figurative language to illustrate that words aren’t violence.

Gervais, predictably, given his overt approval of TERF talking points, builds his entire indignant anti-woke stance specifically around transgender people: their anatomies, their pronouns, their existence. It takes him all of two minutes to make his first trans joke: A mention of fellow British comic Eddie Izzard, who has long identified as transgender and began using she/her pronouns two years ago. The “joke” isn’t actually a joke, because Eddie Izzard merely existing isn’t inherently funny; but the audience laughs at Izzard’s name, right on cue, because Gervais, having already condescended to explain irony to us, expects us to laugh at the whole concept of Izzard, or maybe the concept of finding Izzard funny, or an uncomfortable mix of both.

It doesn’t matter which of these jokes is intended, because Gervais has already rejected the counterargument that a hateful joke is only “ironic” when everyone is in on it and when no one is secretly having their actual bigotry reinforced by the cruelty at the center of said irony. Toward the end of the show, he drags out an appalling sketch full of racist Sinophobic stereotypes, which he insists isn’t racist because it’s “ironic.” Doesn’t matter that this kind of “irony” is what allows white supremacists to operate in plain sight. Doesn’t matter that five minutes into SuperNature an audience member audibly laughs at a mention of rape, which might indicate that perhaps Gervais’s audience isn’t as ironically humorous as he wants them to be. No, Gervais seems to have decided that because words aren’t literal physical violence, nothing he says can cause harm.

And once establishing this up front, he proceeds to use trans people as a (metaphorical) punching bag.

Gervais has said repeatedly that he doesn’t disrespect “real” trans people; rather, he only mocks specific people he sees as male sexual predators who’ve usurped “real” trans identity in order to prey on women by pretending to be women. This is pure TERF rhetoric divorced from reality.

Gervais has spent years making fun of trans women onstage; on social media, he’s spent the past few years amplifying transphobic TERF talking points about how trans people (usually women) are rapists, perverts, liars, and linguistic terrorists. Much like JK Rowling, Gervais claims to be very concerned with the state of cis men pretending to be women in order to rape them, while insisting that “real” trans people should be respected; but if you look for examples of Gervais actually embracing, supporting, or affirming “real” trans women, you won’t find any. Trans people seem to only interest Gervais when he has an excuse to dismiss or dehumanize them — or joke about beating them up or compare them to rodents.

Onstage, his obsession with trans people includes a vile fixation on anatomy. He expects his audience to laugh at the idea of a trans woman having male anatomy; he expects us to ridicule the idea that anyone wouldn’t laugh. Over and over again he “jokes” about trans women having penises. He says he personally supports trans rights, then talks about trans women raping other women, implies that trans people are “mental,” and implies that trans people invented “self-identification” sometime after the ’60s in order to exploit their marginalized status. Woe for today’s kids, he suggests, whose too-woke parents might force them into a “trendy” trans lifestyle.

Any trans person who complains about his comedy is “virtue signaling.” Such trans people are, he tells us, motivated by superiority and a wish to tear other people down. It surely has nothing to do with the astronomically high levels of violence against trans people, nor the equally high levels of trans mental health issues and suicidal ideation — all of which are directly linked to harmful transphobic rhetoric. Of course Gervais makes no mention of this; it’s not funny, after all, and it undercuts his ultimate thesis that insensitive or deliberately offensive humor should be seen as a form of affection and caring. We’re expected to speak his lingua franca of bad jokes and meet him halfway by agreeing that “identity politics” should be just as susceptible to mockery as everything else.

Given the TERF-y interludes, SuperNature is an unnecessarily cruel piece of transphobic rhetoric. But without the TERF-y parts, it just feels superfluous; there’s no real reason for it to exist. Gervais needs transphobia to have something to say, and apparently Netflix does too. The streaming service surely understood that by releasing this special, it would get more of the backlash it received after The Closer. During that backlash, Sarandos first said that he didn’t believe The Closer could cause any real-world harm, then recanted that statement, possibly after trans activists and allies pointed out horrifying trans suicide statistics. (It’s worth noting that Netflix has also made a significant financial investment in Chappelle.) Netflix went through all this once, yet still chose to release SuperNature at a moment when vulnerable trans people are already getting hit with wave after wave of unnecessary cruelty.

The implication seems clear: Netflix is just fine suffering transphobic fools for views. It’s just fine inflicting bigoted hateful rhetoric on its subscribers. It’s just fine with the subsequent real-world harm that comes from amplifying such views. The platform’s choice to release this special now, during a wave of unprecedented anti-trans legislation, is unconscionable. It’s not just that Gervais, his fellow contrarian comedians, and his large audience may feel validated and affirmed in their hatred of trans people and will pay that forward in the form of more cruelty and discrimination. It’s not just that actual trans people may be hurt, may internalize harmful messages and shame because of SuperNature’s existence. It’s that Netflix is an influencer; its decisions make waves. By openly signaling that trans people and their allies are disposable within its business model, Netflix sets a precedent that many other companies in the tech and entertainment industries are likely to follow.

And, sure, this is nothing new — but that doesn’t make it hurt less. If trans people are to be thrown to the wolves of comedy, one would hope the wolves would at least be funnier.

“I think they’re trying to solve something that’s not a problem,” Robert Mendelsohn, a professor of forest policy and economics at Yale, told Recode. “The kinds of things that blockchains are good at, which is sort of just making sure nothing gets lost, isn’t really a problem with the current market. That’s not where they’re broken. Where they’re broken is the credits themselves may not actually be causing any reduction in carbon.”

As my colleague Umair Irfan wrote in 2020, one of the key principles for making a good carbon credit is “additionality,” or ensuring that a carbon offset project will actually lead to a reduction of emissions that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. This is trickier than it sounds: A 2020 Bloomberg investigation found that carbon offsets sold by the Nature Conservancy, one of the largest environmental nonprofits in the world, were based on forested properties that likely would have been preserved even without extra funding. In other words, the emissions reductions from those trees would have happened anyway, making them invalid as carbon offsets.

That’s just one example. Carbon credits and offsets frequently miss the mark, and in some cases can even cause additional harm to forests. Carbon offsets that don’t provide any additional emissions reductions allow companies who buy them to claim they’ve made a difference to their carbon footprint without having any real impact. “They haven’t offset anything,” Mendelsohn explained. “They’ve just got this worthless piece of paper saying they got a credit. You could put that credit onto the blockchain, and it would be just as worthless.”

It’s not exactly clear how Flowcarbon would actually make carbon offsets more useful or trustworthy. Nicole Shore, a Flowcarbon spokesperson, said in an email that the credits backing the GNT “follow the criteria of the global carbon market” and come from one of four large carbon credit registries. The company also says the carbon credits behind its token have been “certified,” but it doesn’t detail how that certification process happens, or if it has a verification system that’s any different from the current carbon credit market.

The difficulty of verifying carbon credits means it can take a while for more of them to come on the market. As more companies become interested in purchasing credits to offset their emissions, that can create a bottleneck.

“The problem with the current markets is nothing to do with how we can trade these more effectively,” said Anil Madhavapeddy, who is an associate professor of computer science and technology at Cambridge University and the director of the Cambridge Center for Carbon Credits. “We just do not have enough supply.”

Madhavapeddy, like Flowcarbon, is working on building a blockchain-based solution for carbon credits. But unlike Flowcarbon, he isn’t interested in building a marketplace for those credits. Instead, he’s focused on verifying they’re real by using satellite imagery and remote sensing technology to monitor carbon offset projects around the world and recording the results on the blockchain. Madhavapeddy hopes that technology will make it easier to get more carbon credits on the market more quickly.

Instead of building a whole new marketplace for carbon credits, for now, Madhavapeddy just wants to help ensure that those credits are based on something that will have a real impact. “Because the supply is so constrained, you don’t need to tokenize all these things,” Madhavapeddy told Recode. “It takes years for new (carbon offset) projects to kick off, so every marketplace constructed right now is just shuffling the same old pieces around.”

Crypto’s climate credit gold rush isn’t going unnoticed by the traditional players in the market, either. Verra, the world’s largest carbon-offset registry, announced this week that it will no longer allow its credits to be used as the basis for crypto tokens. Active crypto markets for carbon credits, Verra said, create too much confusion over who should get final credit for carbon reductions.

Once carbon credits become more readily available — and verifiably trustworthy — it’s possible companies like Flowcarbon could be key to making carbon credits and offsets more easily accessible to regular folks who are interested in offsetting their carbon emissions. But let’s not forget what happened last time Adam Neumann promised big things when founding a company with a questionable business model. WeWork speculated on how flexible our relationship with our built environment could be, and while it remains to be seen if Flowcarbon is any different, we can’t afford to leave our relationship with the natural world open to similar speculation.

Commodifying nature is part of what led us to our climate mess in the first place. Perhaps it’s time to learn from our mistakes.

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