Russian drought, wildfires & grain export ban (2010)
2010–2011: a documented market event that overlapped the wholesale price windows of 1 tracked ingredient — co-occurrence in time, never an asserted cause.
What happened
USDA FAS documented that a severe summer heat wave, drought and wildfires cut Russia's 2010 harvest. Russia's total grain output fell from about 97 million metric tons in 2009 to roughly 60 MMT in 2010 (a ~37% decline), and Russian sunflower-seed output was estimated about 10% below 2009. Russia is a leading wheat and sunflower-oil exporting country. Effective August 15, 2010, the Russian government imposed a temporary ban on exports of wheat, barley, rye and maize (plus wheat and rye flour), initially set to run through December 2010 and later extended through July 1, 2011. (The export ban itself covered grains, not oilseeds or vegetable oil.)
Documented account from our open, cited registry (sources below). Shown as context beside the price record — co-occurrence in time, never an asserted cause.
Affected ingredients
- Vegetable oil
Why these ingredients were exposed
Each affected ingredient's public supply structure — where it comes from and how much it leans on imports. Context that makes the co-occurrence with a documented event legible, never its cause.
- Vegetable oilDomestically sourced comes almost entirely from domestic production, with little import buffer. Its exposure runs through domestic production structure, not import origins — a domestic event overlaps its price window.
It explains why an ingredient sits in the path of a documented event — not that the event caused any price move. Co-occurrence in time, never a cause.
The detected moves that overlapped
Each figure is a wholesale reference against its own ±26-week normal — a market move, never a delivered price.
Vegetable oil — May 2010: the wholesale reference ran −27% below its ±26-week normal, held 426 days.
Co-occurrence in time, not a cause.
What moved together
Co-occurrence, not cause
Vegetable oil
In Vegetable oil's 6 notable moves, these ingredients ran the same direction in the same weeks:
Moving in the same weeks is not one thing causing another — many of these share a growing region, a shipping lane, or an aisle. It is a directed, bounded count: in K of an ingredient's own notable moves, another ran the same way.
Sources
2 sources
- Effects of the Summer Drought and Fires on Russian Agriculture — USDA Foreign Agricultural Service (GAIN)
- Ban on Grain Exports from Russia Comes to Force on August 15 — USDA Foreign Agricultural Service (GAIN)
Documented events come from our open, cited registry (CC‑BY). Price moves are detected from public history (USDA/BLS/FRED) and shown as co-occurring context, never asserted as the cause. How events are picked.