Global food supplies just keep getting even tighter, and global hunger has risen to extremely alarming levels. People on the other side of the world are literally starving to death as I write this article, but most of us in the western world simply do not care about the millions that are deeply suffering because the mainstream media hardly ever talks about what is happening. But the truth is that we are feeling the impact of this global food crisis too.
As I warned my readers repeatedly, the primary way that this crisis would manifest itself in wealthy countries during the early stages would be through higher food prices, and that is precisely what we are witnessing. On Friday, I went to the grocery store and a small bag of chips that I could once buy on sale for 99 cents now has a regular price of 5.99 stamped on it.
Throughout the store there were so many products that I refused to purchase because I thought that they had simply become way too expensive, but those prices are not going back down to where they once were. Food inflation is here to stay, and the entire planet is going to suffer as a result.
Unfortunately, most people simply cannot comprehend what is taking place on a planetary scale.
As a major British news source recently noted, we are facing “environmental breakdown and food system failure” simultaneously…
We face an epochal, unthinkable prospect: of perhaps the two greatest existential threats – environmental breakdown and food system failure – converging, as one triggers the other.
A decade ago, some experts were optimistically talking about eradicating global hunger completely.
But the number of hungry people around the world started to go back up in 2015, and things have been getting worse ever since…
For many years, the number of hungry people fell. But in 2015 the trend turned and has been curving upwards since.
According to the United Nations, nearly 30 percent of the global population does not have constant access to food right now, and there are approximately 900 million people that are facing “severe food insecurity”…
The food security and nutrition situation remained grim in 2022. The report finds that approximately 29.6 percent of the global population, equivalent to 2.4 billion people, did not have constant access to food, as measured by the prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity. Among them, around 900 million individuals faced severe food insecurity.
Just think about that for a moment. 2.4 billion people do not have enough food to eat.
And as global food supplies get even tighter, that number is only going to go higher.
Unfortunately, in 2023 we have seen crops get devastated by natural disasters and bizarre weather patterns over and over again.
For example, in areas of Vermont that have been hammered by flooding this month many farmers have completely lost all of their crops…
Farmers across our region are grappling with massive crop losses due to this week’s flooding. That includes dozens of farm operations at Burlington’s Intervale, who are picking up the pieces as they face a difficult road ahead.
“For us. it is kind of over until we can replant,” said Hillary Martin with Diggers’ Mirth Collective Farm. She says the flooding was a total crop loss for everyone at the Intervale and that her farm has already lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. “We have just totaled what we lost that was in the field — about $250,000 in produce. That does not include what we can not plant for the next month.”
Vermont Agriculture Secretary Anson Tebbetts says many farmers are in the same situation statewide. “It will run millions of dollars. It will be extraordinary because of just the crop losses,” he said.
In the middle of the country, a crippling drought is absolutely devastating corn and soybean farmers…
Record-breaking heat and pockets of drought are baking farmland across the country, threatening crop yields and squeezing out any remaining wiggle room to cope with more extreme weather this summer.
Throughout the Sun Belt, an extended heat wave is sending temperatures soaring into the triple digits and risking heat stress to crops. At the same time, breadbasket states in the Midwest are struggling to manage a drought that’s affecting some areas for a second year in a row. Nearly two-thirds of Kansas is in severe, extreme or exceptional drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, and about half of Missouri and Nebraska are in the same rough shape.
Of course it isn’t just the U.S. that is being hit extremely hard.
As I explained last week, tomato prices in India have gone up by 400 percent due to the historic disasters that nation has been dealing with.
In central Canada, one farmer hasn’t had a good crop since 2016 due to the seemingly endless drought that has plagued Saskatchewan…
Seven is often considered a lucky number but not for Tyson Jacksteit.
That’s how many consecutive years of drought his family has now gone through on their west-central Saskatchewan farm near Golden Prairie.
The last good crop was in 2016, he said, with the rain from that year carrying them through the next. But since then it’s just been “a downhill slide of drought.”
“We’re in survival mode,” he said last week.
Unfortunately, conditions are only going to get more difficult for farmers around the globe in the years ahead.
So I would encourage you to stock up while you still can.
I know that prices may seem high now, but they are only going higher.
For instance, canned peaches are already quite expensive, but soon they will cost a whole lot more because “the Peach State” is barely going to produce any peaches at all in 2023…
Midsummer is the peak of juicy peach season in the state of Georgia. But, recently, the Peach Cobbler Factory in Atlanta ran out of peaches and was forced to pivot to… apple cobbler.
The Peach State lost more than 90% of this year’s crop after a February heat wave followed by two late-spring frosts. The triple-whammy destroyed peach varieties specifically bred to survive different weather scenarios and wildly inflated prices of the fruit. It also moved much of the local market — in some cases, quite unwillingly — to California peaches.
But, beyond the toll this took on employment, the state economy, decades of tradition and restaurant menus, peaches are a matter of pride for Georgians. The peach is the state fruit. Its in the name of dozens of state roads. It’s even on the flip side of the Georgia state quarter. So, how embarrassing is this?
In previous articles I have discussed many other examples.
All over the world, food producers are facing unprecedented challenges.
You can believe that things will eventually “return to normal” if you want, but the truth is that a “return to normal” is simply not in the cards.
We really have reached a major tipping point, and from this moment forward we really are going to see things happen that once would have been unimaginable.
Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Article cross-posted from The Economic Collapse Blog.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.