Multi-year drought conditions in much of China have reportedly forced the country to the brink of collapse.
Should the expected water catastrophe unfold, China’s grain and electricity production will fail. This would also result in global shortages of food, industrial materials, consumer goods and more – and on a much greater scale than the current post-plandemic supply chain problems.
Any water-driven disruptions in China would be felt by the entire world as the communist country is a major producer of food, energy and other needed goods and materials. The global economy as we currently know it would fold like a cheap suit.
“Unlike other commodities, water does not have any viable substitutes,” reports Foreign Affairs. “It is essential for growing food, generating energy, and sustaining humanity.” (Related: China’s Yangtze River, a major shipping route, is drying up and causing problems for the nation’s economy.)
“For China, water has also been crucial to the country’s rapid development: currently, China consumes ten billion barrels of water per day – about 700 times its daily oil consumption. Four decades of explosive economic growth, combined with food security policies that aim at national self-sufficiency, have pushed northern China’s water system beyond a sustainable level, and they threaten to do the same in parts of southern China as well.”
Water supplies in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and North China Plain 50% or more below UN’s definition of acute water scarcity
Fresh water has been a problem in many parts of Asia for some time now. In Hong Kong, for instance, seawater has been used to flush toilets for several decades now.
In China as of the year 2020, water availability in the North China Plain has been at least 50 percent below what the United Nations considers to be a situation of acute water scarcity. The situation is the same or worse in the cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin.
The North China Plain’s 253 cubic meters per capita of available water is less than half of Egypt’s 570 cubic meters per capita in 2019, a year of severe water stress for the North African country. Keep in mind that Egypt does not have to maintain a large manufacturing base like China does.
Another problem with China’s water situation is that much of what it does have is undrinkable. A 2018 analysis from China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment found that, despite minor improvements, nearly 20 percent of China’s surface water is too contaminated to be consumed by humans.
Roughly seven percent of China’s available water is unfit for any use, scientists say.
“The quality of groundwater – which is critical for ensuring water supplies during drought – was worse, with approximately 30 percent being deemed unfit for human consumption and 16 percent deemed unfit for any use,” reports further explain.
China has a water resource overuse problem
A big part of that contamination comes from China’s heavy industries, which pollute dangerous chemicals straight into the ground or into existing water supplies.
There is also the chemical runoff from industrial agriculture, which, like in the United States, leaves the ground and environment polluted for many years as it seeps into groundwater supplies.
“Data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization indicate that China uses nearly two and a half times as much fertilizer and four times as much pesticide as the United States does despite having 25 percent less arable land,” Foreign Affairs explains.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is notorious for trying to cover up these inconvenient facts as they make the country look bad. But the truth is out there for inquiring minds, and it tells the story of what the future holds for China and the rest of the world that relies on the country as a manufacturing and trade partner.
The North China Plain has also been getting overused for many years, leaving it at risk of drying up completely. The most populated areas in Northern China, including areas along the Yangtze River ranging from eastern Sichuan to southern Jilin – home to more than one billion people – are also suffering as water supplies dry up.
For the past 15 years, in fact, much of that region has seen steady declines in not just groundwater but also lake and river water.
“In parts of North China, groundwater levels have declined by a meter per year, causing naturally occurring underground water storage aquifers to collapse, which has triggered land subsidence and compromised the aquifers’ potential for future recharge,” Foreign Affairs warns.
“Recognizing the urgency of the problem, China’s government in 2003 launched the $60 billion South-to-North Water Transfer Project, which draws water from tributaries of the Yangtze River to replenish the dry north. To boost rainfall (and sometimes engineer better weather, for example, for Olympics ceremonies and party anniversary events), China has also deployed aircraft and rockets to lace clouds with silver iodide or liquid nitrogen, a process known as cloud seeding.”
The latest news about world weather events that are damaging the global economy can be found at WaterWars.news.
Sources for this article include:
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.
This is all BS. All of these “shortages” are manufactured and fictitious.