News over the past few days carried reports that the governor of Michigan has decreed that those living in the state shalt not garden. Governor Gretchen Whitmer ordered that stores could not sell seeds and plants, forcing the closure of garden centers and plant nurseries as non-essential. So much for “victory gardens.”
As a result, some have noted that now in Michigan, you can get an abortion, but you can’t buy a lawnmower.
Whitmer’s headline-grabbing totalitarianism aside, the worldwide shutdown of anything deemed non-essential by know-nothing government bureaucrats is now causing the world to rush toward a catastrophic famine.
There are already millions of newly unemployed people who once lived paycheck to paycheck. They are now lining up for desperately needed supplies from food banks. In one example, already on March 30 the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported that hundreds of cars had lined up for food at one Pittsburgh-area food bank. “Organizers were prepared to serve 1,700 families, a hundred more than last week when some people were turned away,” the paper reported.
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Food itself, however, may become harder to get, as farmers, unable to sell their products, face agricultural catastrophe. Dairy farmers in Wisconsin are dumping thousands of gallons of milk that they can no longer sell. On April 1, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported that one dairy operation, Golden E Dairy, “opened the spigot and started flushing its milk into a wastewater lagoon — 220,000 pounds a day through next Monday.” And it’s not just one dairy farm that is being affected. “I think that a lot of milk will all of a sudden be dumped.” Julie Sweney from FarmFirst Dairy Cooperative told the Journal-Sentinel. “Everyone across the industry is feeling distressed now.”
A significant amount of the product supplied by Wisconsin’s large dairy industry is sold through restaurants and other parts of the food-service trade, much of which has been shut down. Without those markets, suppliers are at risk for business disruption. Other farm products are also facing challenges.
“U.S. farmers have destroyed millions of pounds of perishable food like tomatoes, lettuce and green beans because growers lost a vast number of customers after the coronavirus pandemic struck,” reported Paul Brinkman for the United Press International (UPI) news agency.
“It’s a catastrophe, it really is,” Florida tomato grower Tony DiMare told UPI. “It’s been a disaster at every level — lost crops, lost sales, lost packing inventory,” DiMare said.
Meat producers are also warning of supply disruptions. Smithfield Foods, the largest supplier of pork products in the United States, was forced to close a major facility indefinitely due to coronavirus exposure to employees. According to Smithfield, “The plant is one of the largest pork processing facilities in the U.S., representing four to five percent of U.S. pork production. It supplies nearly 130 million servings of food per week, or about 18 million servings per day.”
In its press release announcing the closure of the plant, the Smithfield’s CEO warned that the country’s food supply situation was growing precarious.
“The closure of this facility, combined with a growing list of other protein plants that have shuttered across our industry, is pushing our country perilously close to the edge in terms of our meat supply,” said Smithfield CEO Kenneth M. Sullivan. “It is impossible to keep our grocery stores stocked if our plants are not running. These facility closures will also have severe, perhaps disastrous, repercussions for many in the supply chain, first and foremost our nation’s livestock farmers. These farmers have nowhere to send their animals.”
Farmers in the United States, as well as agricultural processors, are among the chief suppliers of food to not just the United States and North America, but to the world. U.S. agricultural exports over the last eight years have ranged from $129 billion to as much as $152 billion annually, representing food supplies that feed people around the world. If American farmers, food processors, and agricultural equipment companies are impaired or even forced out of business due to the bureaucratically engineered coronavirus economic depression, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people around the world will be put at risk of hunger and starvation. At best, living standards and general standards of health and welfare will decline significantly.
If this disruption is allowed to continue much longer, the risk of famine and mass death due to starvation increases substantially.
Image: Kameleon007
