Is famine in our future? Could that possibly happen here in America, the land of prosperity and plenty?
And, if the answer is “yes,” then how near might that awful future be? And what might be done to prevent or mitigate it? Right now, tens of millions of people in the world’s poorest countries are facing starvation. The blame for much of that human desolation can be laid squarely on the shoulders of the World Health Organization, the United Nations, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the national “health” bureaucracies that have used politicized “science” to force deadly lockdowns on the entire human population of our planet.
In April of 2020, David Beasley, executive director of the United Nations World Food Program, warned that the Covid lockdowns could prove more lethal than the virus. “In a worst-case scenario, we could be looking at famine in about three dozen countries,” Beasley stated. There’s “a real danger that more people could potentially die from the economic impact of COVID-19 than from the virus itself,” he warned, noting further that the world could face “multiple famines of biblical proportions within a few short months.” That was two years ago. As we reported at the time, “The shutdowns and lockdowns mandated by WHO, the CDC, and other ‘health authorities’ have disrupted planting, harvesting, processing, and transportation of foodstuffs globally, with the deadliest effects falling on the world’s most vulnerable.” Those deadly effects are still being felt in Ethiopia, Kenya, Chad, Burundi, Eritrea, Comoros, Sudan, Yemen, and dozens of other countries.
We who are fortunate enough to be living in the developed countries are not currently experiencing famine, but rapidly escalating food prices and product availability are seriously affecting European and American households. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index (CPI) reported on April 12 that consumers are facing the highest price increases in 40 years. “The all items index continued to accelerate, rising 8.5 percent for the 12 months ending March, the largest 12-month increase since the period ending December 1981,” the CPI report stated.
However, when it comes to food, we are seeing double-digit inflation for the prices of many food items. “The food at home index rose 10.0 percent over the last 12 months, the largest 12-month increase since the period ending March 1981,” according to the CPI report, which also noted, “The index for meats, poultry, fish, and eggs increased 13.7 percent over the last year as the index for beef rose 16.0 percent.”
As troubling as those price increases may be, we “ain’t seen nothing yet.” Based on the trillions of dollars that our federal overlords have been spending (and creating out of thin air), prices on everything will continue spiraling upward. Added to the price inflation will be increasing occurrences of food shortages — along with the shortages we are already experiencing in building materials, electronic components, seeds and feeds, fertilizer, truck drivers, railroad crews, and much more.
News reports indicate that food shortages and rationing are already occurring in the United Kingdom and across Europe, with cooking oils being the primary product currently most in short supply. Stores are limiting customers to two-three bottles of oil. According to U.S. Department of Agriculture data, Ukraine produces 46 percent of the world’s sunflower seed and safflower oil and has been unable to process and ship four million tons of sunflower oil due to the Russian invasion. The shortage of sunflower oil and safflower oil has also resulted in a run on olive oil, rapeseed oil, and other cooking oils. With the destruction and disruption that the war has brought, it is unlikely that crops will get planted and harvested this year, or that transportation infrastructure will be rebuilt any time soon, making it all but certain that cooking-oil shortages will continue indefinitely. Farmers in the U.K. are warning that shortages of milk, eggs, chicken, beef, lamb, and pork are also on the near horizon because they have had to drastically reduce their herds and flocks due to skyrocketing prices and/or unavailability of feed and fertilizer.
In the United States, parents have been having difficulty finding baby formula, with widespread reports of formula shortages, rationing, and empty shelves across the country. (See here, here, and here.) Pet owners are also finding empty shelves where they regularly have bought food for Fido and Fifi. (See here and here.)
However, an unprecedented perfect storm comprised of multiple factors is already bearing down on us, guaranteeing that we will soon be seeing and feeling more serious repercussions in our food chain than we have ever experienced here in America in our lifetimes. In addition to the natural vagaries of weather (storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts, frosts) and diseases (both plant and animal) that always have bedeviled agricultural output, we are facing a host of politically driven issues that are causing or exacerbating our looming food crisis. Among them are:
• Covid lockdowns: Yes, the lockdowns (for the most part) have been lifted, but the harmful impacts linger. And we have no guarantee that politicians and bureaucrats will not reimpose them. During 2020 and 2021 farmers were forced — due to unavailability of workers, truckers, feed, and fuel, as well as the closure of restaurants, cafeterias, and local farmers markets — to destroy massive amounts of produce and much of their livestock. Many farms went bankrupt; many more are barely hanging on.
• Suicidal spending/runaway inflation: Although President Biden wants to scapegoat Vladimir Putin for the inflation that he (and Congress) are causing, he cannot escape the fact that his multi-trillion-dollar spending binges have ballooned our money supply with unbacked currency, with the inevitable result that each dollar is worth less and each purchase requires more of the devalued dollars. This fact is glaringly confirmed by an incredibly damning chart from the Federal Reserve (which the “mainstream” media has completely ignored) showing that in the past two years we have experienced an enormous and unprecedented increase in the M1 money supply (M1 being circulating currency and coins plus checking accounts). According to the Fed, M1 money supply stood at $3.993 trillion in January of 2020. By January of 2021 it had leaped to an incredible $18.107 trillion, and by January of 2022 it had soared to $20.582 trillion. That’s five times the M1 money supply that existed two years earlier! Not all of that has resulted from federal spending; it has also come from people transferring funds from M2 instruments (saving accounts, CDs, and other time deposits) and investments into cash, likely out of fear of the inflation and confiscatory tax policies and restrictions unleashed by the Biden-Pelosi forces, as well as to deal with economic hardships caused by Covid policies. The enormity of this money supply increase means that we face a crushing inflation/hyperinflation burden for the foreseeable future.
• Russia-Ukraine War: As noted above, the conflict is already being felt in the global cooking oil market. It goes well beyond that, of course. Russia is a major world supplier of wheat, corn, coal, oil, gas, and metals. Ukraine is also a major global supplier of wheat, corn, rye, barley, and oats. Subtracting both of these key players from the market — by war and/or sanctions — guarantees serious disruptions to, and shortages throughout, the food chain.
• Fuel prices: Another major impact of the Russia-Ukraine War is its effect on the availability and cost of fuel, which dramatically impacts every facet of farming operational costs, from preparing the soil to planting to harvesting, processing, and transporting the product to market. Closer to home, and prior to the Russian invasion, President Biden began crippling the U.S. economy, including U.S. food producers, his first day in office by signing an executive order to shut down the Keystone XL Pipeline, while greenlighting Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline that President Trump had blocked. Biden followed that up by halting oil and gas development in Alaska’s ANWR, stopping oil and gas leases on federal lands, crippling U.S. refineries, and begging OPEC (including America-hating dictatorships Iran and Venezuela) to send us more oil. Biden is trying to hide the impact of his policies by raiding the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which will leave us without any reserves should we really need them, if, for instance, he takes us into a war with Russia.
• Fertilizer costs, availability: Russia and Belarus, the second- and third-largest producers of potash, together control about 40 percent of global production of potash, an essential ingredient of commercial fertilizer. Russia also produces about 66 percent of the world’s ammonium nitrate, another essential ingredient. Both countries are under sanction, putting a huge squeeze on fertilizer and driving up its cost. In Canada, which is the largest single source of potash, Communist China’s state-owned YanCoal has taken over North American Potash, a major producer. There is an additional problem in that fertilizer production uses very energy-intense processes, and, as already noted, the Biden administration has reduced the supply and driven up costs for all energy sources.
• Destructive federal government water policies: Without water crops perish and livestock die — and urban populations starve. It’s that simple. The western states of the United States are in the throes of a multi-year drought, the result of back-to-back La Niñas — not global warming. This has been a common occurrence over the past millennium in this arid region. California farms, which produce two-thirds of the nation’s fruits and nuts and over a third of its vegetables, are going under due to year-after-year reductions of irrigation water. Thousands of productive almond trees that take decades to grow have been cut down for lack of water. The farms of California’s huge Central Valley and the Klamath Basin straddling the California-Oregon border are dying, as federal bureaucrats override their legal water rights in order to deliver the precious liquid to the “endangered” delta smelt and short-nosed sucker fish.
• Fedgov payments to farmers not to plant: Currently, under the federal Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), the Biden administration is paying farmers to not farm on 2.4 million acres of cropland. Another 1.275 million acres of arable land is lying fallow under the Wetland Reserve Program (WRP). That’s a lot of potential food-growing land that is being kept out of production at a time of increasing food scarcity.
• Fedgov ethanol mandates: Since 2007, when the Energy Independence and Security Act was signed into law by then-President George W. Bush, American refiners have been saddled with the federal mandate to add ethanol to gasoline. This has been good for the corn lobby, but not so great for consumers, who pay more at the pump and more for meat, eggs, and other food products affected by the grain supply. Science shows it is also harmful for the environment, as even “progressives” are now admitting (see here and here). Of course, readers of The New American were clued in to the ethanol fraud in numerous articles in these pages going back over a decade. See for example here, here, and here.)
• Supply chain bottlenecks. Nobody gets any if it doesn’t get there. The Covid lockdowns introduced us to the reality of the supply chain crisis, and Team Biden’s attacks on our energy sector have exacerbated an already bad situation. Among the many detriments of the crisis is the difficulty of getting replacement parts for trucks, farm equipment, and food-processing machinery, without which food production comes to a halt.
• Avian flu: Another outbreak of avian flu (again out of China) has caused authorities and farmers in the United States to destroy 27 million chickens and turkeys since February. These cullings are already affecting the price and availability of chicken meat and eggs. With infections reported in 29 states, many more cullings are expected.
• Mysterious food-processing plant fires: Over the past several months, more than a dozen food processing plants across the country have been destroyed or heavily damaged by fires and, in two cases, by planes crashing into them. News reports and official investigations are ascribing this string of mishaps to accidental causes. The New American has been following up on these stories to learn if investigations turn up any evidence of arson in these cases, and to ascertain the level of impact these incidents might have on our overall food picture.
Finally, in addition to all of the above, there is an additionally troubling factor: the globalist elite’s increasing focus over the past several years on “food security.” The same organizations that have been in the forefront of the tyrannical response to the Covid pandemic are also the key leaders of the global food-security movement: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Council on Foreign Relations, World Economic Forum, United Nations, World Health Organization, Brookings Institution, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the rest of the usual suspects in the globalist cabal. These are the same forces that have been pounding the overpopulation/population control themes for decades, while also praising Communist China, the world champion of famine genocide through central planning.
All the above combined factors (and more) are sending an unmistakable danger signal of approaching disaster. Unfortunately, too many of our elected officials are ignoring the warnings. American voters who care about their vanishing freedoms and protecting their loved ones against famine have an opportunity in the upcoming primaries and the general election in November to send an unmistakable message back to the government officials who would use food shortages and rationing to fasten tyranny upon us. In the meantime, those who are wise will make sure that their households have at least several weeks — if not several months — of food in their pantries.
