Over the past few years, we have seen food prices in the United States and other wealthy countries do things that they have never done before. Unfortunately, this is just the beginning. Global food supplies are getting tighter, and meanwhile global demand for food just continues to increase. For decades, many among the elite were optimistic that someday we would be able to eliminate global hunger completely because tremendous progress was being made. But then right around 2015 things started to reverse, and now the trend is very much going in the wrong direction. According to the United Nations, 2.4 billion people did not have enough food to eat last year, and 900 million of them were facing severe food insecurity. Those numbers will almost certainly go even higher this year, because it is getting more difficult for poor countries to get the food that they need to feed their populations.
For example, just consider what is happening to rice prices.
Rice is a core staple for billions of people around the globe, and India is the most important exporter of rice by a very wide margin…
More than half of the rice imports in around 42 countries originate from India, and in many African nations, India’s market share in rice imports surpasses 80%, according to Ifpri.
In top consuming countries in Asia – Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka, for example – the share of rice consumption in total calorie intake a day ranges from 40% to 67%.
Now that India has severely restricted rice exports, what are those nations going to do?
According to the BBC, India’s export ban “has sparked worries about runaway global rice prices”…
Indica white rice dominates around 70% of the global trade, and India has now ceased its export. This comes on top of the country’s ban last year of exports of broken rice and a 20% duty on non-basmati rice exports.
Not surprisingly, July’s export ban has sparked worries about runaway global rice prices.
Sadly, this is already starting to happen.
In fact, the price of Thai white rice is already “up over 50% since the start of 2022”…
On Wednesday, the Thai Rice Exporters Association revealed that the price of Thai white rice 5% broken, a key Asian benchmark, reached the highest level since Great Financial Crisis. This surge is mainly attributed to increasing fears of a global shortage due to the damaging effects of the El Nino weather phenomenon on Asian farmlands and India’s recent decision to restrict certain rice exports.
Thai white rice 5% broken hit $648 per ton this week, the highest level since October 2008. Prices are up over 50% since the start of 2022.
Of course it isn’t just the price of rice that is rising.
Here in the United States, just about everything in our grocery stores is becoming a lot more expensive…
Americans are noticing a lot of sold-out notes on Costco shelves in the past few weeks. Shortages of household supplies and basic grocery items seem to be rapidly spreading across Costco warehouses. However, most of the complaints have been published by shoppers that just can’t believe the price hikes they’re seeing at their local stores. One major example of this was the 250% increase in the price of 40-packs of Kirkland-branded water bottles. One Redditor reported that the bulk buy, which cost $1.44 as recently as a year ago, now costs $4.99.
“Yeah that used to be the case at the beginning of the year, just checked yesterday, and $4.99, ridiculous,” user u/ghx16 wrote.
User jasonsparks19 said that crab legs have more than doubled in price over the past year: “King crab legs went from $23/lb to $48/lb.”
That’s a 110% increase. It has been difficult for shoppers to find chicken nuggets in stock at Costco, as they are often sold out in the frozen section due to the high demand. They used to cost $13 for a four-pound bag, but are now going for $19.99, causing some customers to express their displeasure with the price hike on Reddit.
“I saw them today for the first time in a while too. My jaw dropped when I saw the price and I kept walking,” a commenter said.
Have you noticed similar things where you live?
I wish that I could tell you that there will soon be relief, but I can’t do that. As I regularly discuss on my websites, global food production is being hammered by crisis after crisis right now. And the food that isn’t being produced in 2023 is food that will not be available on store shelves in 2024.
Here in the western world, that will mean even higher prices, but on the other side of the planet that will mean that even fewer poor people will have enough food to eat.
A global famine has now begun, and in a recent article James Lasher explained that many Americans are feverishly preparing for even harder times ahead…
The price of groceries continues to rise putting millions on edge about the availability of food across the U.S.
Many are bracing for even harder times to hit the country and are preparing, much like Joseph did as a ruler in Egypt before the famine struck.
But if you only listen to the mainstream media, they are making it seem as though nothing is amiss at all.
For example, the following comes from an article that USA Today just posted entitled “Need an afternoon sweet treat? McDonald’s new Peanut Butter Crunch McFlurry is out now”…
If you’ve been able to recover from McDonald’s purple Grimace shakes, the fast-food chain has a new sweet treat available for a limited time.
Just try not to pass out this time for a viral TikTok trend, OK?
The Peanut Butter Crunch McFlurry debuted Wednesday at participating locations nationwide. The dessert is made with vanilla soft serve and blended with crispy cereal mix and chunks of chocolatey peanut butter cookie.
See, everything must be just great if this is front page news!
Amazingly, this is the sort of pablum that passes for “journalism” these days.
They aren’t telling you the truth.
Keep it simple. Avoid the scams. Let Genesis rollover your retirement accounts into a self-direct IRA backed by physical precious metals.
The truth is that we really are facing a historic global food crisis, and in the months and years ahead it is going to get a whole lot worse. But for now, many in the western world are completely ignoring the millions upon millions of deeply suffering people on the other side of the planet. Of course ignoring them will not make the problem go away, nor will it do anything about the long-term trends that are making the global food crisis even worse with each passing day.
Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Article cross-posted from The Economic Collapse Blog.
Controlling Protein Is One of the Globalists’ Primary Goals
Between the globalists, corporate interests, and our own government, the food supply is being targeted from multiple angles. It isn’t just silly regulations and misguided subsidies driving natural foods away. Bird flu, sabotaged food processing plants, mysterious deaths of entire cattle herds, arson attacks, and an incessant push to make climate change the primary consideration for all things are combining for a perfect storm to exacerbate the ongoing food crisis.
The primary target is protein. Specifically, they’re going after beef as the environmental boogeyman. They want us eating vegetable-based proteins, lab-grown meat, or even bugs instead of anything that walked the pastures of America. This is why we launched a long-term storage prepper beef company that provides high-quality food that’s shelf-stable for up to 25-years.
At Prepper All-Naturals, we believe Americans should be eating real food today and into the future regardless of what the powers-that-be demand of us. We will never use lab-grown beef. We will never allow our cattle to be injected with mRNA vaccines. We will never bow to the draconian diktats of the climate change cult.
Visit Prepper All-Naturals and use promo code “veterans25” to get 25% off plus free shipping on Ribeye, NY Strip, Tenderloin, and other high-quality cuts of beef. It’s cooked sous vide, then freeze dried and packaged with no other ingredients, just beef. Stock up for the long haul today.
It is not just food. I have a grandson starting college in a few weeks majoring in Engineering, so I went to office Depot to buy him a bunch of supplies. Drafting supplies…..crazy prices
As I walked the store, I came to a huge ‘end cap’ sale display of printer/copies paper. The were the boxes about the size of milk crates……..They were ‘On Sale’ for $89.99, it blew my mind. I owned my own business for 30 years retiring in 2005. I remember these boxes being around $15.00.
I walked further came to the stapler rack. A metal Swingline desk stapler was $30.00. These prices blow my mind, they are unfathomable to me. Pencils, pens, markers all stupid high prices.
Mike,
A few points; one, the elites progressive elites are not “Optimistic” about feed all of the ‘hungry’ in the worls….they are delusional and live in a Pollyanna world. Second, let’s let India and Asian counties worry about their rice supply. The World, The Globe is too large a place to be one community. Each country needs to take care of their own country and stop with the ‘Globalism crap. Third, The piece about the price of bottled water at COSTCO is complete nonsense, that the jerk a Reddit wrote and has stupidly been repeated/posted on many alt-news sites. The price of the 40 pack WAS NOT $1.44 a year ago and IS NOT now $4.99. The price was $2.99 for several years till this year going up to $3.99.
It is irresponsible to keep posting misinformation from one Reddit nut.
Two big bowls of tomatoes just resulted in 7 liter jars of canned tomatoes for me. But what would we do for the other six months of the year? Thinking of getting a green house. Every year our garden grows another few yards, going even larger next year. That india rice is our favorite, bought another three bags of twenty pound bags at costco the other day, going back for more. And then on top of everything, some stupid viral video caused celtic sea salt to more than double in price, if you’re lucky enough to even be able to purchase. I keep seeing all the illegal migrants in Colorado shocked by what appears to be their first visit to a real grocery store. We should be exporting food to these people, not importing them so they can shop at the grocery store with our tax dollar subsidies. I show people our emergency food and they say; we’re coming over here if there is a problem. I say; No, no you are not. You have time and if you go hungry there is nobody to blame but yourself. One single working week devoted to costco can provide a thrifty shopper six months worth of food, or at least well over a month. Shop there monthly and build up your supplies. We roll out of there with thousand dollars on a pallet. Then we go shopping in our basement for whatever we’ll be eating that day and week. And if you can bulk buy on the sale period, like we have the great macaroni’s which were a third off, so we bought a years worth. Same for chili, and other non perishables. My fridge broke and we need another, they laughed at me for asking where the under five hundred lowest simple price one was. However I learned something new that we’ll probably want the ‘garage ready’ fridge in the future, as that has more durable equipment and can last longer, not made to break like the modern ones.