I think your experience in the Soviet Union isn’t that similar to how it would go here. If there were a serious rumor in the US that sugar was going to run out and people started buying a lot, initially stores would have empty shelves, yes—this is what happens right before a blizzard or hurricane. But then prices would rise, some people would decide they didn’t want sugar at the higher price, it would be worth it to import sugar from other countries we don’t normally import from (paying the high sugar import tariff that makes the US use so much corn) and sugar production would ramp up. Raising prices to manage high demand and merchants being free to arrange their own imports are both (a) really important and (b) to my knowledge not the sort of thing that the Soviet Union did.
Rising prices would affect poorest countries, like Egypt was affected in 2011 by rising prices of grain. And if there is a global scale panic, when increasing the production like 2 times would take years—and will be risky for manufactures, as when the panic ends, people will stop buying sugar at all, as they have large stockpile.
I think your experience in the Soviet Union isn’t that similar to how it would go here. If there were a serious rumor in the US that sugar was going to run out and people started buying a lot, initially stores would have empty shelves, yes—this is what happens right before a blizzard or hurricane. But then prices would rise, some people would decide they didn’t want sugar at the higher price, it would be worth it to import sugar from other countries we don’t normally import from (paying the high sugar import tariff that makes the US use so much corn) and sugar production would ramp up. Raising prices to manage high demand and merchants being free to arrange their own imports are both (a) really important and (b) to my knowledge not the sort of thing that the Soviet Union did.
Rising prices would affect poorest countries, like Egypt was affected in 2011 by rising prices of grain. And if there is a global scale panic, when increasing the production like 2 times would take years—and will be risky for manufactures, as when the panic ends, people will stop buying sugar at all, as they have large stockpile.