(The Economic Collapse Blog)—As grocery prices have risen, demand at food banks throughout the country has surged to very alarming levels. At the end of 2024, I wrote about how demand at food banks had risen to record levels all over the United States. Unfortunately, demand has continued to rise in 2025, and now the government shutdown has shifted America’s hunger crisis into overdrive. Millions of very hungry people are showing up at food banks looking for something to eat, and resources are being stretched to the limit.
There is no area of the nation that is not being affected by this crisis.
For example, it is being reported that food banks in Iowa are experiencing “record demand” during this government shutdown…
Food pantries across Iowa are seeing record demand as families wait for the federal government to restore their food assistance benefits.
So what does “record demand” look like?
Well, at one food bank in Iowa they are serving about twice as many people as usual…
While families wait, many are turning to food pantries for help. At WayPoint Resources in Waukee, the line for food stretched out the door Monday.
“We just opened at noon today. And already in that first hour, we saw double the number of people that we normally see,” said Melissa Stimple, the center’s executive director.
We are seeing similar things happen in other parts of the nation too.
In southwest Texas, one network of food banks is now serving nearly 170,000 people per week…
Eric Cooper, president and CEO of San Antonio Food Bank, which serves 29 counties in southwest Texas, said the number of families seeking help has increased since it was first announced that there would be a disruption in SNAP benefits should the government shutdown continue.
Cooper said San Antonio Food Bank, which is part of the nonprofit organization Feeding America, typically feeds 105,000 to 120,000 people per week but is now seeing close to 170,000 people per week.
When you suddenly go from serving 120,000 people per week to serving 170,000 people per week, it is going to be very difficult to have enough food for everyone.
Often those at the end of food bank lines end up with nothing, and that is why so many people are lining up early.
On Monday, the line at one Bay Area food bank “stretched all the way down the sidewalk”…
On Monday, in a parking lot of Contra Costa College in San Pablo, the line for food stretched all the way down the sidewalk.
“We’re expecting at least 500 families to come out to our distribution,” said program coordinator Geo Dinoso.
When he opened the food line, the crowd was a little hard to believe, but for Dinoso, not very surprising.
In Detroit, “dozens of cars” were “lined around the block” yesterday morning…
On Detroit’s east side, dozens of cars lined around the block at Forgotten Harvest’s Jermaine Jackson Academy drive-thru food pantry Monday morning. It was the location’s first time operating since SNAP funding lapsed this month.
Kim Lewis, who runs the site, said her group faced cold weather and rain to serve more than 250 families.
The “higher demand” was clear – volunteers described cars waiting along Gratiot Avenue hours before the pantry’s opening. Forty minutes after the site closed, the group was still loading up cars, only stopping after supplies depleted.
In Colorado, approximately 100 vehicles were lined up at a food bank in Greeley before the doors were even opened…
About 100 cars lined up along H Street near Weld Food Bank in Greeley on Monday morning before the organization opened its doors, their drivers and passengers waiting to pick up food on the third day of a lapse in funding for the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.
Staff and volunteers worked through a typical lunch break to meet demand, maneuvering shopping carts full of food to their awaiting recipients. By the end of the day, the food bank served about 2,200 people, according to Weston Edmunds, the food bank’s director of marketing and communications.
This is what our country looks like now.
Millions of formerly middle class Americans are now in desperate need of food.
I have been ranting about the destruction of the middle class for years, but a lot of people out there didn’t take me seriously.
Now look at what has happened.
If you think that we are facing this crisis just because of the current government shutdown, you are way off.
One food bank in Dayton, Ohio was experiencing a dramatic spike in demand “long before the shutdown ever happened”…
Howard said the increased need at the Pantry started long before the shutdown ever happened, and it’s only gotten worse as a result.
“Year to date we’re 30% higher than last year. This week alone we signed up 23 new families,” she said.
The Pantry served 18,000 people in 2024, 60% of whom which were adults over 60 years old and children under 18.
As I have carefully documented, hunger has been rising in the United States for years.
And now we are rapidly getting to a point where there simply will not be enough food for everyone.
On Monday, large numbers of people lined up to get some food at a facility in Portland. Unfortunately, those that were waiting at the end of the line faced the possibility of ending up with nothing because there just wasn’t enough food…
The situation has led to unprecedented demand at local food providers, such as the Blanchet House in Northwest Portland, where lines stretched two blocks on Monday morning as people waited in the rain for a meal.
Julia Showers, communications director for the Blanchet House, noted the unusual demand: “We’re seeing lines, historic lines. Our staff had to go out before we closed the doors and just let everyone know that we have to get a line here. Some people might not get a plate.”
The longer this government shutdown continues, the worse things will get.
The same thing could be said about our air traffic crisis.
According to ABC News, the U.S. Department of Transportation “might be forced to shut down the airspace in certain parts of the country if the government shutdown continues into next week”…
The Department of Transportation might be forced to shut down the airspace in certain parts of the country if the government shutdown continues into next week, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on Tuesday.
“So if, if you bring us to a week from today, Democrats, you will see mass chaos,” he said. “You will see mass flight delays. You’ll see mass cancelations, and you may see us close certain parts of the airspace, because we just cannot manage it because we don’t have the air traffic controllers.”
We have never seen anything quite like this before.
Air traffic controllers are required to work without pay through the government shutdown, but vast numbers of them are choosing not to show up for work…
Nearly 50% of all major air traffic control facilities face staffing shortages, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. Air traffic controllers are required to work without pay for the duration of the shutdown.
About 13,000 air traffic controllers are currently working without pay, according to the FAA. On Friday, the agency said that 80% of New York area staff had called out.
Hopefully the government shutdown will be resolved soon and air traffic will return to normal.
But even if the government shutdown ends, America’s growing food crisis is not going to go away.
Food prices will continue to rise, and global food supplies are just going to continue to get even tighter.
There are multiple long-term trends that are playing havoc with global food production.
I warned that this would result in higher food prices in wealthy western nations, and that is precisely what has transpired.
Sadly, this is just the beginning.
We are going to continue to lose valuable top soil, fertilizer prices will continue to spike, weather patterns are only going to get crazier, and our planet will continue to become increasingly unstable.
On top of everything else, we continue to poison our air, our water and our soil in countless ways.
There is only one way that all of this is going to end, and I don’t have to tell you that it isn’t going to be pretty.
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
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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.