(The Economic Collapse Blog)—People keep acting as if we are living in “normal” times, but the truth is that these are not “normal” times at all. We are in the midst of a “perfect storm”, but most people in the general population don’t seem to realize this.
While the mainstream media is endlessly focused on political drama, our world is being deeply troubled by war, economic problems, food shortages, nightmarish pestilences and terrifying natural disasters. But as bad as things are at this moment, I am entirely convinced that they are about to get a whole lot worse.
I would like to start by talking about war. The IDF is preparing to conduct an operation in Rafah, and that could cause the entire Middle East to erupt in flames. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is pledging that his forces will eventually move in no matter how negotiations for a temporary ceasefire with Hamas go. Meanwhile, we just learned that Israel has just conducted airstrikes on the outskirts of Damascus…
Israeli aircraft have reportedly attacked a location on the outskirts of the Syrian capital of Damascus late Thursday (local), a security source told Reuters.
While there has been no immediate confirmation via Syrian state media, widely circulating images have emerged on social media showing plumes of smoke rising high over buildings which were struck.
It is just a matter of time before all-out war erupts in the region.
Speaking of all-out war, French President Emmanuel Macron is warning that French troops could be sent to Ukraine if Russian forces break through the Ukrainian front lines…
Emmanuel Macron has said he would be prepared to send troops to Ukraine if Vladimir Putin’s forces break through the front lines – further raising the risk of NATO forces clashing with Russia’s armies.
In an interview published today, the French president said the issue of sending troops would ‘legitimately’ arise if Kyiv and president Volodymyr Zelensky made such a request.
The Economist said Macron gave the interview after delivering a keynote speech last week where he declared that Europe is ‘mortal’ and could ‘die’ partly due to the threat posed by Russian aggression after its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Those that have been following the war closely know that the Russians are already breaking through the front lines in several areas along the eastern front.
So will Macron make good on his threat? If so, that will put us literally one step away from nuclear conflict.
All throughout history, large scale wars have been accompanied by famine. For now, we still have plenty of food to eat in the western world, but it is a far different story in the poorest areas of the planet.
For example, the famine in Sudan has become so severe that some people are literally eating dirt…
There is so little food in some areas of Sudan that people are taking extreme measures to survive.
In the Al Lait refugee camp, they are eating dirt.
I was stunned when I read that.
If you were hungry enough, would you fill your stomach with dirt?
Apparently, some desperately hungry people are rolling dirt into a ball and swallowing it with water…
Akok, 41, reached Al Lait in December, but has no work and can’t feed the family. At times, they go two or three days without eating. When that happens, Akok said, he watches helplessly as his wife and children dig holes in the ground with a stick, slide their hands in and grab some soil. Then they roll the soil into a ball, put it in their mouths and swallow it with water.
“I keep telling them not to do it, but it’s hunger,” he said. “There is nothing I can do.”
In my latest book I have an entire chapter about the emerging global famine. What we are witnessing now is just the tip of the iceberg compared to what is eventually coming.
I have also been warning that frightening pestilences will break out all over the globe, and right now we are witnessing an unprecedented outbreak of dengue fever in South America.
At this point, more than four million cases of dengue fever have been registered in Brazil alone so far this year…
Brazil surpassed 4 million cases of dengue fever registered this year, according to an update from the Ministry of Health’s Arbovirus Monitoring Panel this Monday. In total, 4,127,571 probable cases of the disease were reported across the country in the first four months of 2024.
As for dengue deaths, 1,937 have been confirmed and 2,345 are under investigation. The incidence rate of the disease in the country is 2,032.7 cases for each group of 100,000 population.
And Peru has just declared a nationwide health emergency because cases of dengue fever are rising so rapidly in that nation…
The Peruvian government’s cabinet approved the motion to declare a health emergency on Monday, Vasquez told journalists, hours after he said a dengue outbreak was “imminent.”
“There are 20 regions (out of 25) that will be declared in a health emergency due to dengue,” Vasquez said in an earlier interview on local radio station RPP.
Here in North America, H5N1 has been killing cows, cats, chickens and turkeys.
Now authorities are desperately hoping that it does not make the jump to humans. For much more on this, please see my recent article entitled “The Strain Of The Bird Flu That Is Killing Cats In Texas Is Causing ‘Brain Hemorrhaging’ And ‘Blindness’”.
Lastly, I would like to talk about the unusual natural disasters that we have been experiencing lately.
In 2024, southern California has been getting shaken on a regular basis. Yesterday, it was hit by a magnitude 4.1 earthquake…
An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 4.1 has struck near Corona in Riverside County, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The USGS says the quake struck at 1:49 p.m. just 5.3 miles from Corona. It was originally reported as a 4.5 magnitude but was ultimately reduced to a 4.1.
Overall, there have been 748 earthquakes in California and Nevada within the past seven days.
It is just a matter of time before “the Big One” strikes, but at this stage most of those living in the region have stopped listening to such warnings.
The east coast has also been experiencing unusual seismic activity.
On the first day of this month, New Jersey was shaken by a magnitude 2.6 earthquake…
A magnitude 2.6 aftershock has rattled New Jersey on the first day of May after a dramatic earthquake shook parts of the east coast in early April.
The Garden State has been rocked by more than 150 aftershocks since the initial 4.8 magnitude earthquake which centered near Lebanon on the morning of April 5.
More than 42 million people from New York to Connecticut and Philadelphia felt the first quake, and New Jersey residents have been plagued by tremors ever since.
Normally, the east coast if very, very quiet.
So what we are seeing right now is definitely quite unusual.
The middle of the nation has not been left out either.
In recent days we have seen tornado after tornado rock the center of the country.
For example, one area of Nebraska was just hit by a tornado that had wind speeds of up to 165 miles per hour…
Nebraska brothers tell a terrifying tale of feeling a tornado pull their home apart, sucking them out and tossing them with debris.
“Ok, I’m cool to leave for work,” Roger Slatten thought to himself Saturday afternoon after Elkhorn, Nebraska’s tornado sirens went silent. But they sounded again. A strong EF-3 tornado was bearing down on the Omaha suburb with 165 mph winds.
His friend called him in the car and said, “Get back home, It’s going crazy.” Roger called his brother Royce and told him to rush home. They planned to get the two dogs and all shelter in the basement.
When will people finally start waking up?
What we are experiencing is not even close to normal.
It seems like almost every new day brings us yet another new crisis or disaster to deal with, and I have a feeling that the pace of events is only going to escalate as this year continues to roll along.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
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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.