It appears that the global food crisis that started in 2022 is going to go to an entirely new level in 2023. As I have been documenting on my websites, worldwide supplies of food have been getting tighter and tighter for months. Historic droughts have been crippling food production all over the northern hemisphere, much less fertilizer is being used in poorer countries because of how insanely expensive it has become, and the war in Ukraine has restricted the flow of agricultural exports out of one of the most important breadbaskets on the entire planet. Thankfully, a deal that was signed in July had allowed hundreds of ships loaded with precious grain to travel through the war zone successfully. But now that deal is completely dead and the Russians have resumed their blockade of Ukrainian ports…
Russia resumed its blockade of Ukrainian ports on Sunday, cutting off urgently needed grain exports to hungry parts of the world in what President Biden called a “really outrageous” act.
Biden — speaking in Wilmington, Del. — warned that global hunger could increase because of Russia’s suspension of a U.N.-brokered deal to allow safe passage of ships carrying grain from Ukraine, one of the world’s breadbaskets.
“It’s really outrageous,” Biden said Saturday. “There’s no merit to what they’re doing. The U.N. negotiated that deal and that should be the end of it.”
So why did the Russians do this?
Is it just because they decided to be mean?
No, it is because the Ukrainians (with help from their western allies) stupidly decided to attack Russia’s Black Sea fleet with a bunch of drones…
Hours later, a statement by the foreign ministry in Moscow said: “The Russian side cannot guarantee the safety of civilian dry cargo ships participating in the ‘Black Sea Initiative’, and suspends its implementation from today for an indefinite period.”
It said the move was “in connection with the actions of the Ukrainian armed forces, which were led by British specialists” and that these actions “were directed… against Russian ships that ensured the functioning of the said humanitarian corridor”.
Moscow claimed 16 aerial and maritime drones were destroyed, and that only a minesweeper had sustained damage.
What did they think was going to happen?
Did they actually believe that the Russians were just going to stand aside and allow the Ukrainians to sell their grain to the rest of the world after their ships had been attacked?
That is not how the real world works.
Since the deal was originally signed in July, over 9 million tons of grain had safely left Ukrainian ports.
Now that deal is dead, and this is going to make our rapidly growing food crisis even worse.
Even now, there are tens of millions of people in poor countries around the world that are on the brink of starvation…
Indeed, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reports that the ongoing war in Ukraine has brought 70 million people to the brink of starvation. In addition, the war also affected the food supply of another 345 million people. The Executive Director of the UN World Food Program, David Beasley, recently said, “It is incredibly troubling that 50 million of those people in 45 countries are suffering from very acute malnutrition…” Since Russia invaded its neighbor on Feb. 24, Beasley said, soaring food, fuel, and fertilizer costs have driven 70 million people closer to starvation.
As shortages intensify and food prices soar, unrest is inevitably going to erupt all over the planet.
For example, just check out what has already been happening in Tunisia…
Tunisians have been hit with soaring food prices and shortages of basic staples in recent weeks, threatening to turn simmering discontent in the North African country – the cradle of the Arab Spring protests – into larger turmoil.
Sugar, vegetable oil, rice, and even bottled water periodically disappear from supermarkets and grocery stores. People stand in line for hours for these food essentials that have long been subsidized and are now increasingly available in rations only. When they do appear on the shelves, many people cannot afford to pay the staggering price for them.
Sadly, this is just the beginning.
Here in the United States, conditions are certainly a whole lot better than they are in Tunisia, but there are several factors which could cause our situation to deteriorate significantly in the months ahead.
First of all, almost 75 percent of the areas where winter wheat is grown in the U.S. are currently suffering at least some level of drought…
La Niña has returned for the third consecutive winter, allowing for drier-than-average conditions across America’s crop belt. Some farmers told Bloomberg that conditions are so dry that “fertilizer is evaporating from the soil, and plants are struggling to emerge from the ground.”
The odds are stacking up that this winter’s growing season in the Midwest is going to be a bad one. The latest government data shows drought is intensifying across the western half of the US.
As for winter wheat, nearly 75% of the crop areas are in a drought, the highest level in decades.
Secondly, a potential rail strike threatens to cause severe supply chain problems all across America starting next month.
Let us hope that the strike does not materialize, because it would really disrupt the flow of goods across the country for as long as it lasts.
Thirdly, it appears that the entire western world may be wrestling with temporary shortages of diesel fuel in the months ahead. For much more on this, please see my recent article entitled “A Crippling Shortage Of Diesel Fuel Threatens To Devastate Western Economies In 2023“.
These latest issues just add to the growing list of problems that the food industry has been experiencing. According to Kraft Heinz CEO Miguel Patricio, higher prices and supply chain headaches are likely to continue to be with us for the foreseeable future…
Kraft Heinz CEO Miguel Patricio says higher inflation and supply issues are coursing through the food industry, forcing companies to adopt new strategies for everything from production to promotion to packaging.
And he doesn’t see an end to either issue anytime soon.
“We’ve already increased the prices that we were expecting this year, but I’m predicting that next year, inflation will continue, and as a consequence [we] will have other rounds of price increases,” Patricio said in an interview with CNN Business.
But while we are dealing with significantly higher prices and occasional shortages, people in poor countries on the other side of the planet will literally be trying to figure out where to get enough food to feed their families.
The UN has already warned us that “multiple famines” are likely in 2023, and with each passing day the number of people living on the brink of starvation just keeps getting larger.
This is a global crisis that isn’t going away, and thanks to new developments in Ukraine it just got even worse.
***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.
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Article cross-posted from End of the American Dream.
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.
