(OPINION) Global food supplies just keep getting even tighter, and global hunger has risen to extremely alarming levels. People on the other side of the world are literally starving to death as I write this article, but most of us in the Western world simply do not care about the millions that are deeply suffering because the mainstream media hardly ever talks about what is happening.
But the truth is that we are feeling the impact of this global food crisis too. As I warned my readers repeatedly, the primary way that this crisis would manifest itself in wealthy countries during the early stages would be through higher food prices, and that is precisely what we are witnessing.
On Friday, I went to the grocery store and a small bag of chips that I could once buy on sale for 99 cents now has a regular price of 5.99 stamped on it.
Throughout the store, there were so many products that I refused to purchase because I thought that they had simply become way too expensive, but those prices are not going back down to where they once were. Food inflation is here to stay, and the entire planet is going to suffer as a result.
Unfortunately, most people simply cannot comprehend what is taking place on a planetary scale. As a major British news source recently noted, we are facing “environmental breakdown and food system failure” simultaneously…
We face an epochal, unthinkable prospect: of perhaps the two greatest existential threats – environmental breakdown and food system failure – converging, as one triggers the other.
A decade ago, some experts were optimistically talking about eradicating global hunger completely. But the number of hungry people around the world started to go back up in 2015, and things have been getting worse ever since…
For many years, the number of hungry people fell. But in 2015 the trend turned and has been curving upwards since.
According to the United Nations, nearly 30 percent of the global population does not have constant access to food right now, and there are approximately 900 million people that are facing “severe food insecurity”…
The food security and nutrition situation remained grim in 2022. The report finds that approximately 29.6 percent of the global population, equivalent to 2.4 billion people, did not have constant access to food, as measured by the prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity. Among them, around 900 million individuals faced severe food insecurity.
Just think about that for a moment. 2.4 billion people do not have enough food to eat. And as global food supplies get even tighter, that number is only going to go higher.
Unfortunately, in 2023 we have seen crops get devastated by natural disasters and bizarre weather patterns over and over again. For example, in areas of Vermont that have been hammered by flooding this month many farmers have completely lost all of their crops…
Farmers across our region are grappling with massive crop losses due to this week’s flooding. That includes dozens of farm operations at Burlington’s Intervale, who are picking up the pieces as they face a difficult road ahead.
“For us. it is kind of over until we can replant,” said Hillary Martin with Diggers’ Mirth Collective Farm. She says the flooding was a total crop loss for everyone at the Intervale and that her farm has already lost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“We have just totaled what we lost that was in the field — about $250,000 in produce. That does not include what we can not plant for the next month.”
Vermont Agriculture Secretary Anson Tebbetts says many farmers are in the same situation statewide. “It will run millions of dollars. It will be extraordinary because of just the crop losses,” he said.
In the middle of the country, a crippling drought is absolutely devastating corn and soybean farmers…
Record-breaking heat and pockets of drought are baking farmland across the country, threatening crop yields and squeezing out any remaining wiggle room to cope with more extreme weather this summer.
Throughout the Sun Belt, an extended heat wave is sending temperatures soaring into the triple digits and risking heat stress to crops. At the same time, breadbasket states in the Midwest are struggling to manage a drought that’s affecting some areas for a second year in a row.
Nearly two-thirds of Kansas is in severe, extreme or exceptional drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, and about half of Missouri and Nebraska are in the same rough shape.
Of course, it isn’t just the U.S. that is being hit extremely hard. As I explained last week, tomato prices in India have gone up by 400 percent due to the historic disasters that nation has been dealing with.
In central Canada, one farmer hasn’t had a good crop since 2016 due to the seemingly endless drought that has plagued Saskatchewan…
Seven is often considered a lucky number but not for Tyson Jacksteit. That’s how many consecutive years of drought his family has now gone through on their west-central Saskatchewan farm near Golden Prairie.
The last good crop was in 2016, he said, with the rain from that year carrying them through the next. But since then it’s just been “a downhill slide of drought.” “We’re in survival mode,” he said last week. (READ MORE)
