You may have heard the term “BRICS” when reading about world affairs and wondered what it was all about. As we watch the American dollar and economy lose power on the world stage, this alliance could quickly move to take its place, especially as other countries that used to be allied with us move over this bloc.
As a matter of opinion, I think that on the global stage, BRICS is a union we should watch, as there are several large economic powers involved that aren’t exactly friends of the United States of America. Should this group continue to grow, it’s possible that it could dramatically affect us with regard to world trade. And that’s at the very least.
Let’s look a little deeper into it.
What is BRICS?
BRICS is an economic alliance that has been around since about 2001. Jim O’Neill from Goldman Sachs coined the acronym BRIC to represent the original countries: Brazil, Russia, India, and China. By 2010, South Africa had been added, bringing us to the current acronym. O’Neill predicted that by 2050, the original four nations would be the dominant forces in the global economy. Investopedia explains:
Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa ranked among the world’s fastest-growing emerging market economies for years, thanks to low labor costs, favorable demographics and abundant natural resources at a time of a global commodities boom.
It’s important to note that the Goldman Sachs thesis wasn’t that these countries would become a political alliance (like the EU) or even a formal trading association. Instead, Goldman said they have the potential to form a powerful economic bloc, even acknowledging that its forecasts were optimistic and dependent on significant policy assumptions.
Still, the implication was that economic power would bring political power, and indeed leaders from BRICS countries regularly attended summits together and often acted in concert with each others’ interests.
Interest faded in the BRICS countries by around 2015, as per Investopedia. But does that mean we should write them off, too?
BRICS is expanding.
For many years, the United States has been a primary global economic power, but as our star shines a little less brightly due to our economic difficulties, poor governmental management, and less than stellar relationships with several other countries, BRICS seems poised to step into the position our nation once held.
In 2015, at their 6th summit, the founding nations created the New Development Bank, with a currency pool of 100 billion USD and an additional reserve of another hundred billion. The countries also agreed to cooperate with one another in regard to credit and innovation.
This has expanded over the years, and the nations have cooperated in things like planning an optical fiber submarine communications cable system for BRICS countries so that the US could not spy on its communications. (Although plans are in place, it has not yet been built at the time of this writing.)
But now, with the war between Russia and Ukraine, and tensions with China, things seem to really be gearing up.
What countries are involved in BRICS?
Current members of BRICS are still the original ones.
- Brazil
- Russia
- India
- China
- South Africa
But…the union seems intent on expanding, and other nations are in the midst of an application process. Multiple countries have asked to become a part of the bloc.
The nations that have formally applied for acceptance into the cooperative are:
- Algeria
- Argentina
- Bahrain
- Egypt
- Indonesia
- Iran
- Saudi Arabia
- United Arab Emirates
In addition, interest has been expressed by the following countries:
- Afghanistan
- Bangladesh
- Belarus
- Kazakhstan
- Mexico
- Nicaragua
- Nigeria
- Pakistan
- Senegal
- Sudan
- Syria
- Thailand
- Tunisia
- Turkey
- Uruguay
- Venezuela
- Zimbabwe
Sources: OilPrice.com, Bloomberg, Times of India, Anadolu Ajansi, Sputnik Globe
The original nations are meeting in South Africa on June 2nd and 3rd to discuss expansion.
Why do we care about BRICS?
Not a great deal has been mentioned about this in the news, but I believe that such a union is a very troubling sign. I’ve written before that the dollar is rapidly losing international trust and potentially even petrodollar status, and it seems as though a group such as this is well-poised to step into our place. Plus, a lot of these nations aren’t exactly friendly to the United States in the first place. A formal alliance between countries like China, Russia, India, and Iran is troubling, particularly as our government has instituted brutal sanctions in the past.
Bloomberg has said it expects the growth of BRICS to surpass the economic expectations of the G-7, the economic group of which the US is the leader, which consists of the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Italy, and Canada.
Zero Hedge reports on several reasons this is concerning.
Per their analysis, while G7 and BRICS nations each contributed equally to global economic growth in 2020, the western-led bloc’s performance has recently declined. By 2028, the G7 is expected to make up just 27.8 percent of the global economy, while BRICS will make up 35 percent.
The estimations came just a few weeks after the Deputy Chairman of Russia’s State Duma, Alexander Babakov, revealed that BRICS is working on developing a “new currency” that will be presented at the organization’s upcoming summit.
BRICS member states account for over 40 percent of the global population and around a quarter of the global GDP.
The interest from Global South nations to join the bloc comes at a time when more and more governments move away from the US dollar.
The greenback has become more unreliable for dollarized economies due to rising interest rates regulated by the US Federal Reserve (FED) and the bank’s weaponization of the dollar through financial sanctions.
In addition, the west – especially Europe – is facing a growing energy crisis resulting from sanctions targeting Russian energy markets due to its invasion of Ukraine and the US sabotage of the Nordstream pipeline.
Add to this that several Central and South American countries are interested in joining the ranks of BRICS, and this alliance could quite literally be in our own backyard. While this is assumed to be strictly an economic alliance, what happens if there is a global conflict? Would this coalition carry over into that realm as well?
Sides are being chosen.
What it looks like to me is that sides are being chosen and lines are being drawn. The United States has powerful enemies. (And that’s not even including the ones within our own borders who seem intent on destroying the very fabric of our culture.) While BRICS is not a threat to our way of life today, they could be a formidable foe in the very near future. While we lose economic power, they gain economic power. And in our modern world, that is everything.
For our entire lives, the United States has been on top of the global pyramid. One must wonder, when rivals begin to group together, how long we will keep that position.
The expansion of the BRICS alliance is very important to watch. While we certainly can’t personally influence the proceedings, our awareness can help us to be one step ahead in our preparations. This could eventually destroy our already volatile financial system, so if you haven’t put your savings into a safe holding like gold and silver, you may want to look into that sooner rather than later. We always think we have time, but it looks to me like that presumed time is rapidly running out.
Our concerns are not only within our system but also from alliances that could destroy our global economic power. This would be a crushing blow that would change everything from the price and availability of imports to the very fuel our country runs upon.
But what do you think?
Is the potential expansion of the BRICS alliance concerning to you? Why or why not? Is this something you’ve been watching? How do you think we Americans could be affected by a large, competing economic bloc? Will this affect the way you prep in any way?
Let’s discuss it in the comments.
About the Author
Daisy Luther is a coffee-swigging, adventure-seeking, globe-trotting blogger. She is the founder and publisher of three websites. 1) The Organic Prepper, which is about current events, preparedness, self-reliance, and the pursuit of liberty; 2) The Frugalite, a website with thrifty tips and solutions to help people get a handle on their personal finances without feeling deprived; and 3) PreppersDailyNews.com, an aggregate site where you can find links to all the most important news for those who wish to be prepared. Her work is widely republished across alternative media and she has appeared in many interviews.
Daisy is the best-selling author of 5 traditionally published books, 12 self-published books, and runs a small digital publishing company with PDF guides, printables, and courses at SelfRelianceand Survival.com You can find her on Facebook, Pinterest, Gab, MeWe, Parler, Instagram, and Twitter.
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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.
I believe that BRICS just may be the 10 nation confederacy we read about in the book of The Revelations in the Bible.
The USA is foolish if they think that aligning themselves with the EU will make them financially competitive. Europe is not an industrial power, they build nothing.