The Mississippi River and the Global Economy
The Mississippi River is in crisis this year. It's been running at record low levels for some time now. This has been pushing up barge prices for shipping goods out of the region it serves as a major shipping channel. This has been pushing up pricess on food in an already inflationary period. As the crisis has deepened, it has become a more serious supply chain issue. They are dredging it to keep it functional as a shipping at all, but there is de facto a bottleneck on goods coming out of that region. More recently, the US Army Corps of Engineers has begun building an additional underwater levee to try to prevent salt water from the Gulf of New Mexico from encroaching further upstream than usual and ruining local drinking water supplies. These are all very serious issues and part of why it is so bad is because economies are so global at this point. Historically, a lot of food that was grown was consumed locally and often families grew some portion of their own food. Now we hav...
