A lot of the experts didn’t think that this would happen. Once the pandemic subsided, global supply chains were supposed to return to normal. But now “hundreds of drugs” are in short supply in the United States, and even CNN is admitting that we are in the midst of “the worst food crisis in modern history”.
As I did research for this article, I was stunned by what I discovered. Things are worse than I realized.
I knew that a lot of drugs were in short supply, but it turns out that there have been shortages of many of our most basic antibiotics since last October, and now Pfizer is telling us that several types of penicillin will completely run out later this year…
Pfizer will run out of several doses of penicillin, which treat syphilis, strep throat, and other infections, later this year as shortages ripple across the US supply chain.
The company anticipates running out of the children’s dose of the syphilis drug Bicillin L-A by the end of June, according to a letter Pfizer posted Tuesday on the Food and Drug Administration’s website. The company says it’s prioritizing production of larger doses of Bicillin L-A, which is recommended for pregnant people with syphilis because it is the only drug that can pass through the placenta and also treat the fetus.
A different Pfizer penicillin, Bicillin C-R that treats other bacterial infections but not syphilis, is expected to run out in the third quarter, which ends Sept. 30. Pfizer’s penicillin has been in shortage since April.
Of course there are growing shortages of many other commonly used drugs.
For example, one recent survey discovered that most cancer centers in the U.S. “are reporting shortages of commonly used chemotherapy drugs”…
A recent survey found that a majority of cancer centers are reporting shortages of commonly used chemotherapy drugs used to treat a wide variety of cancers.
Much of the current shortage stems from the temporary closure of a drug manufacturing facility in India that happened after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) found issues in the plant’s quality control.
After I first read that, I immediately had one burning question come to mind.
Why in the world are we having our chemotherapy drugs manufactured in India?
Once the war between the U.S. and China starts, it is going to be exceedingly difficult to get things shipped across the Pacific. So what are we going to do then?
Already, certain chemotherapy drugs are in such short supply that some doctors are being forced to ration care…
Cancer drugs, including widely used cisplatin and carboplatin, are in such short supply that doctors are rationing care, asking patients to drive long distances for treatment, or turning to alternative treatments with riskier side effects.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. But it is happening.
In fact, the New York Times is telling us that there are shortages of “hundreds of drugs” in the United States right now…
Hundreds of drugs are on the list of medications in short supply in the United States, as officials grapple with an opaque and sometimes interrupted supply chain, quality and financial issues that are leading to manufacturing shutdowns.
The shortages are so acute that they are commanding the attention of the White House and Congress, which are examining the underlying causes of the faltering generic drug market, which accounts for about 90 percent of domestic prescriptions.
Meanwhile, global supplies of food just continue to get even tighter, and this is going to greatly affect consumers here in this country.
According to Zero Hedge, global cocoa supplies are becoming extremely tight and this could push chocolate prices to dizzying heights…
Cocoa prices have soared 44% over the last nine months to seven-year highs as the global cocoa bean deficit worsens for the second consecutive year.
“The cocoa market has experienced a remarkable surge in prices … This season marks the second consecutive deficit, with cocoa ending stocks expected to dwindle to unusually low levels,” S&P Global Commodity Insights’ Principal Research Analyst Sergey Chetvertakov told CNBC via email.
If you love chocolate, I would stock up now while you still can.
In addition, Zero Hedge is also reporting that there are very serious concerns about global supply levels of sugar and coffee…
With cocoa consumption at record highs in some Western countries, a worsening global bean deficit will only support higher prices.
Meanwhile, sugar prices hit decade highs on global shortage fears in April. And robusta coffee prices hit a record high days ago on supply fears.
There are just some grocery store aisles where inflation looks exceptionally sticky.
Most of us could live without chocolate, sugar and coffee. But what about the basics?
One food bank in southern Georgia is warning that they are facing a severe shortage of food and they are desperate for help…
“We’re just, we’re experiencing the biggest food shortage we have in the 40 years of food banking,” CEO of Feeding the Valley Food Bank Frank Sheppard said. “And it’s pandemic related. It’s really a number of causes our federal government and state governments provided a plentiful amount of food during the pandemic to help so many more people in need. And those supply lines are just a little slow to replenish. Then you have the whole supply chain issue. Things are just taking 3, 4, 5, 10 times as long to get to us as they used to and rapid inflation is affecting a lot of people, a lot of our donors as well. So it’s really just a perfect storm, unfortunately of circumstances that has got our inventories at record low levels.”
Hopefully some people will step up and help them out.
But the truth is that supplies of food are only going to get tighter and tighter in the months ahead.
In a previous article, I discussed the following facts…
- The winter wheat harvest in Kansas this year is going to be the smallest since 1957.
- U.S. corn prices are expected to soar because the Corn Belt is being hit by the worst drought in 30 years.
- The size of the U.S. beef cow herd has fallen to the lowest level since 1962.
- The orange harvest in Florida in 2023 will be approximately 56 percent smaller than it was in 2022.
- Thanks to absolutely crazy weather patterns, approximately 90 percent of Georgia’s peach crop for this year has been wiped out.
On top of everything else, now millions of Mormon crickets have invaded Nevada, and they are eating everything in sight…
According to the University of Nevada in Reno, Mormon crickets eat native, herbaceous perennials (forbs), grasses, shrubs, and cultivated forage crops, reducing feed for grazing wildlife and livestock. In large numbers, their feeding can contribute to soil erosion, poor water quality, nutrient-depleted soils, and potentially cause damage to range and cropland ecosystems.
Drought encourages Mormon cricket outbreaks, which may last several years (historically 5 to 21 years) and cause substantial economic losses to rangeland, cropland, and home gardens. This is particularly true as adults and nymphs of Mormon crickets migrate in a band, eating plants along their path.
And of course all of this is happening in the context of a horrific global food crisis.
According to one recent report, the number of people around the globe that are facing “acute food insecurity” increased by a whopping 34 percent last year…
The report concluded that the number of people facing acute food insecurity in 58 countries and territories in 2022 was 258 million, and this was the highest in the seven-year history of the report, signifying a deteriorating trend in global acute food insecurity. In 2021, 193 million people in 53 countries and territories faced acute hunger, so the figure for 2022 reflected a 34 percent jump within just one year.
A global famine has begun. And it will eventually get a whole lot worse.
If you have not been preparing for such a scenario, I would strongly encourage you to get started.
As I have detailed in this article, drug and food shortages are already here, and what we have been through so far is just the tip of the iceberg.
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 End of the American Dream.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
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.