(OPINION) ETH – The overall mood of the nation is becoming increasingly sour with each passing day. The pandemic seems like it is never going to end, the drama unfolding in Afghanistan is one of the greatest embarrassments in modern American history, and Joe Biden’s approval rating is sinking like a rock as it becomes clear that he is completely and utterly incompetent.
Unfortunately, average Americans will soon have even more to be stressed out about. As we head into the fall months, our store shelves are going to be getting emptier, shortages of products will become more widespread, and it looks like we could potentially have a very bad harvest season.
I realize that I packed a lot of really bad news into that paragraph, and some of you may be tempted to think that I am exaggerating. So let me take this one step at a time. First, I would like to talk about crop failures. According to the Department of Agriculture, 63 percent of all U.S. spring wheat is in “poor or very poor condition”.
Last year at this time, that number was sitting at just 6 percent… Extreme heat is baking most of the U.S. North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, and Nebraska all contain areas of extreme drought, according to data from the U.S. Drought Monitor.
North Dakota and Minnesota, in particular, are experiencing near-record lows in soil moisture, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. As a result, many crops planted this spring are wilting. Some 63% of the U.S. spring wheat crop is in poor or very poor condition, versus 6% at this time last year, according to Agriculture Department data.
So does this mean that agricultural production will be below expectations? Yes. In fact, the USDA is now projecting that levels of corn, wheat, and soybeans will all be “at their lowest level since 2013”… The poor weather has caused the USDA to scale back its expectations for U.S. crop production in 2021—which, in turn, is causing domestic inventories to dwindle. In the USDA’s latest monthly supply and demand report, the agency pegged ending stocks for corn, wheat, and soybeans all at their lowest level since 2013.
Of course, this comes at a time when we are also seeing crop failures in other key areas all over the globe. For example, we are currently witnessing one of the worst droughts that South America has ever experienced. Agricultural production has been absolutely devastated in Brazil, Argentina, and elsewhere, and this is going to have a huge impact all over the planet. What this means is that global hunger is going to continue to grow rapidly, and this is extremely bad news because global hunger has already been rising at an extremely aggressive rate…
Earlier this month, the humanitarian organization Oxfam released alarming statistics that measured the state of the food crisis after one year of the pandemic. Every minute, eleven people on the planet die of hunger. The number of people experiencing famine-like conditions globally has increased by six times in the past year.
Many Americans may not care about starving people on the other side of the globe, but they are going to care very much when their Christmas celebrations “are ruined” because of severe shortages in the stores. While she was in Singapore this week, Kamala Harris specifically warned us about what is coming…
“The stories that we are now hearing about the caution that if you want to have Christmas toys for your children, it might now be might be the time to start buying them, because the delay may be many, many months,” she said. READ MORE
