Food Production Is Going To Be Substantially Lower Than Anticipated All Over The Globe In 2022 – Michael Snyder
Posted: 20 Apr 2022 01:39 PM PDT
I don’t think that people realize how severe this crisis will eventually become. Never before in modern history have we seen global food production being hit by so many major problems all at once. It truly is a “perfect storm”, and hundreds of millions of people are going to deeply suffer as a result. I would very much encourage you to share this article with as many people as you can, because everyone needs this information. As I discussed yesterday, things may be somewhat bad right now, but conditions will eventually get much worse as the months roll along.
I am going to share a lot of statistics in this article, and each number is important.
But ultimately it is the collective impact of all of these factors together that is really going to hammer us.
Let me start by talking about rice. According to Bloomberg, the global fertilizer crisis is going to result in a loss of production worldwide that is the equivalent of enough food to feed “500 million people”…
From India to Vietnam and the Philippines, prices of crop nutrients crucial to boosting food production have doubled or tripled in the past year alone. Lower fertilizer use may mean a smaller crop. The International Rice Research Institute predicts that yields could drop 10% in the next season, translating to a loss of 36 million tons of rice, or the equivalent of feeding 500 million people.
We don’t eat that much rice in the western world, but in Asia it is a core staple of their diets.
How will all of that food be replaced?
Well, they could eat more wheat, but there is going to be a lot less wheat produced in 2022 as well. In fact, one agricultural commodity expert is warning that the war in Ukraine alone could mean that “between 19 million and 34 million tons of export production could disappear this year”…
Globally, there are six breadbaskets that together supply roughly 60 to 70 percent of global agricultural commodities. The Ukraine–Russia region is responsible for roughly 30 percent of global exports of wheat and 65 percent of sunflower, in a context where those markets are increasingly tight and interconnected—so a slight disruption in supply creates some impact on price.
Of course, we don’t know what the length and scale of this conflict will be. We ran some scenarios, and from our perspective, between 19 million and 34 million tons of export production could disappear this year. If we fast-forward to 2023, the figure could be between ten million and 43 million tons. To translate, that represents caloric intake for 60 million to 150 million people.
I don’t know about you, but I regularly eat a lot of things that contain wheat, and so do hundreds of millions of others.
So this is going to be a huge issue.
And we are already seeing wheat prices go completely insane. From early March to early April, the price of wheat jumped almost 20 percent…
Global food prices rose to their highest-ever level in March, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reported April 8, with wheat prices up nearly 20% from a month earlier.
Unfortunately, the outlook for the months ahead is very troubling due to bizarre weather patterns all over the planet.
Here in the United States, much of our winter wheat has been devastated by persistent drought…
According to the USDA, 69 percent of total U.S. winter-wheat production is in an area experiencing drought, including hard-red winter, soft-red winter and soft white. That includes 82 percent of the production area in Kansas, 82 percent in Colorado, 99 percent in Texas and 99 percent in Montana.
On the other side of the globe, parts of northern Africa are experiencing their “worst drought in decades”…
Morocco’s agriculture minister said the North African country would likely lose 53 percent of its cereals harvest after experiencing the worst drought in decades. Rainfall was 41 percent less than average this season.
So how will all of that food be replaced?
Well, I suppose that we could all eat more corn, but the outlook for corn is not good either.
Russia and Ukraine are normally two of the largest global exporters of corn, but now the war has changed everything, and there have been very serious planting delays here in the United States…
Chicago corn was largely unchanged on Wednesday and near a decade-high scaled in the previous session, as traders fretted over planting delays in the United States and a lack of supplies from war-torn Ukraine.
On top of everything else, there will be a lot less eggs produced this year, there will be a lot less chicken meat produced this year and there will be a lot less turkey meat produced this year because of the nightmarish bird flu pandemic which just keeps getting worse.
According to NPR, the total death toll has now risen to “more than 28 million”…
More than 28 million poultry birds, like chickens and turkeys, have been lost in the U.S. because of a new bird flu. The virus either made the birds sick or they were culled to prevent its spread. Unlike previous bird flus, this one is also affecting a lot of wild birds. As NPR’s Nell Greenfieldboyce explains, that could keep the virus in circulation for a long time.
The vast majority of the time, most of us never even think about where our food comes from.
But that needs to change, because food production systems are collapsing all over the world.
Before I end this article, I wanted to share the tragic news that the headquarters of Azure Standard just burned to the ground…
Dear friends, the headquarters of Azure Standard, the nation’s premier independent distributor of organic and healthy food, was destroyed by fire overnight. There were no injuries. The cause of the fire is unknown and under investigation. The loss of the facility and the impact on company-wide operations is being assessed and expected to be limited and temporary. No other Azure Standard facilities were affected.
I personally know people that get food from Azure Standard, and many of my readers regularly shop with them.
Let us hope that authorities can discover how the fire was caused.
Until we know more, I will refrain from saying too much about what happened.
For years, we have been warned that a global food crisis was coming, and now it has officially arrived.
And with each passing day, more things are happening which threaten to make it even worse.
For now we are still eating food that has already been produced. The real problem will come in the months ahead when total global production of food drops well below total global demand for food.
Things Are Bad Now, But You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet – Michael Snyder
Posted: 19 Apr 2022 04:04 PM PDT
At this moment, food prices all over America are at incredibly low levels. I know what many of you must be thinking. You must be thinking that I have lost my mind, because food prices have been rising at a very rapid rate all over the country. But when I say that food prices are at “incredibly low levels”, I am not comparing them to where they were in the past. Rather, I am comparing current prices to where they will be in the future. Yes, things are bad now, but food prices will be much higher a year or two from now.
The global fertilizer crisis certainly isn’t going anywhere. If anything, it is only going to intensify.
The same thing could be said about the war in Ukraine. Peace talks are absolutely dead, and so it looks like fighting between two of the most critical breadbaskets in the world will continue for months to come.
Meanwhile, the bird flu pandemic continues to wipe out millions of chickens and turkeys all over the globe.
We have never seen a “perfect storm” quite like this, but of course some of the factors that will be driving up food prices are entirely self-inflicted.
For example, the Chinese government didn’t need to lock down nearly 400 million people in a desperate attempt to prevent the spread of COVID. The past two years have provided ample evidence that such lockdowns are quite foolish, but the Chinese went ahead anyway.
As a result, there are now hundreds of commercial ships waiting impatiently off the coast of Shanghai.
MAP: Commercial ships waiting offshore after Shanghai strict lockdown pic.twitter.com/m0qST4v92Y
— Insider Paper (@TheInsiderPaper) April 19, 2022
Those are giant cargo ships that bring stuff across the Pacific Ocean to us.
If the Chinese don’t loosen up, many of our store shelves will become quite empty in the months ahead.
And it isn’t just commercial ships that are sitting idle…
Shanghai is one of the largest manufacturing centers in China, with heavy concentrations of automotive and electronics suppliers. It is home to the largest container port in the world and a major airport that serves inbound and outbound air cargo. Exports produced in Shanghai account for 7.2% of China’s total volume and about 20% of China’s export container throughput moves through the port there, according to the BBVA report.
Most warehouses and plants are closed, nine out of 10 trucks are sidelined, the port and airport have limited function, shipping units are stranded in the wrong places, and freight is piling up.
Needless to say, many of our major retailers simply could not operate without the goods that they import from China.
So we better hope that this potential nightmare gets resolved very soon.
Here in the United States, food prices have been moving higher for months. Just check out these numbers…
The average price of butter grew 11.9% in the last year. Meat has been especially affected by supply chain issues, with 100% meat frankfurters jumping 35.2% since March of 2021 to an average price of $5.18 per pound. Ground chuck, pork chops, and whole chicken showed year-over-year price increases of 11.3%, 15%, and 11.7%, respectively.
Those figures may look bad to you, but the truth is that they only represent the very early chapters of this crisis.
Things are going to get much worse, and here in April anecdotal reports seem to indicate that food price increases seem to be accelerating.
Earlier today, my attention was drawn to a thread on a popular Internet forum where people were discussing recent price increases that they had seen at their local stores. The following are a few examples that I pulled out of that thread…
-“$10. for 1 lb. Bacon”
-“5.19 for one pound of land o lakes butter”
-“a 34 oz can of coffee was $6.99 now is $9.99”
-“$1.09 for a single avocado”
-“$2.31 for a head of iceberg lettuce”
-“I shop for my elderly parents they buy Butterscotch Krimpets every week. Were 2.49 a box now 4.49.”
-“I saw 15.99 per pound for ribeye steak at a grocery store in northeast Tennessee.”
-“Paid $12.95 for a pack of raw chicken thighs a few days ago. Normally they are $3.00 – $4.00”
And thanks to the horrifying bird flu pandemic which is sweeping the nation, the price of eggs is going completely nuts…
The losses to egg-laying flocks have led to producers desperately racing to meet market demands for eggs and egg products, with egg prices increasing as a result. The average price of a dozen eggs is now close to $3.00, up from $1.60 at the beginning of the year, according to the USDA’s national egg report.
If you think that these prices are wild, just wait until they double from their current levels.
All over the world, a great battle for food resources has begun. The Chinese saw this coming in advance, and so they have been engaged in the largest stockpiling program that any of us have ever seen. I wrote about this back in December, but back then most people didn’t understand the true significance of that article.
At that time, the amount of food that the Chinese had already accumulated was already extremely impressive…
Less than 20% of the world’s population has managed to stockpile more than half of the globe’s maize and other grains, leading to steep price increases across the planet and dropping more countries into famine.
The hoarding is taking place in China.
Has the U.S. been doing something similar?
Of course not.
When things get really bad in this country, you will be on your own.
So I hope that you have been preparing for that.
Since the war in Ukraine started, nation after nation has started to implement export restrictions, and a global scramble for agricultural commodities has steadily pushed up prices.
Nobody wants to be caught empty-handed when the music stops, and so there is a race to secure precious supplies while it is still possible to do so.
Sadly, the poorest parts of the world will end up suffering the most as the wealthy countries grab what they can. The dramatic spike that we will soon see in global hunger will be absolutely heartbreaking.
But nobody can say that we weren’t warned in advance. This sort of collapse has been coming for a long time, and now it has arrived.
I would encourage you to stockpile food at these “relatively low prices” while you have the opportunity to do so, because they are only going to go higher from here.
***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***
About the Author: My name is Michael and my brand new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available on Amazon.com. In addition to my new book I have written five other books that are available on Amazon.com including “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, “Get Prepared Now”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”. (#CommissionsEarned) When you purchase any of these books you help to support the work that I am doing, and one way that you can really help is by sending digital copies as gifts through Amazon to family and friends. Time is short, and I need help getting these warnings into the hands of as many people as possible. I have published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and the articles that I publish on those sites are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe. I always freely and happily allow others to republish my articles on their own websites, but I also ask that they include this “About the Author” section with each article. The material contained in this article is for general information purposes only, and readers should consult licensed professionals before making any legal, business, financial or health decisions. I encourage you to follow me on social media on Facebook and Twitter, and any way that you can share these articles with others is a great help. These are such troubled times, and people need hope. John 3:16 tells us about the hope that God has given us through Jesus Christ: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” If you have not already done so, I strongly urge you to ask Jesus to be your Lord and Savior today.
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