Posted on 10/04/2020 3:50:36 PM PDT by Roman_War_Criminal
The head of the UN World Food Program repeatedly warned us that we would soon be facing famines of biblical proportions, and his predictions are now starting to become a reality. We have already seen food riots in some parts of Africa, and it isnt too much of a surprise that certain portions of Asia are really hurting right now. But I have to admit that I was kind of shocked when I came across an article about the hunger crisis that has erupted in Latin America.
According to Bloomberg, a resurgence of poverty is bringing a vicious wave of hunger in a region that was supposed to have mostly eradicated that kind of malnutrition decades ago. We are being told that food shortages are becoming acute from Mexico City all the way down to the southern tip of South America, and those that are the poorest are being hit the hardest.
Let me ask you a question.
What would you do if you didnt have any food to feed your family?
Fortunately, for the vast majority of my readers that is just a hypothetical question. But for many families in Latin America, the unthinkable is now actually happening
He couldnt feed his family. Matilde Alonso knew it was true but couldnt believe it. The pandemic had just hit Guatemala in full force and Alonso, a 34-year-old construction worker, was suddenly jobless.
He sat up all alone till late that night, his mind racing, and fought back tears. He had six mouths to feed, no income and no hope of receiving anything beyond the most meager of crisis-support checks some $130 from the cash-strapped government.
I once had a friend that is a hardcore prepper tell me that his worst nightmare would be for his daughter to tell him that she was hungry and he didnt have anything to give her.
Many of us cant even imagine being in Matilde Alonsos shoes. Sadly, this is going to be happening to even more families soon, because the UN World Food Program is projecting that the number of people facing severe food insecurity in Latin American and Caribbean nations will rise by a whopping 270 percent in the months ahead.
Thankfully, for the moment the United States is in far better shape. But there have been serious shortages of certain items throughout this pandemic, and many grocery stores have had a very difficult time trying to keep their shelves full.
For example, during my most recent trip to my local grocery store I noticed more empty shelves than I had ever seen before, and that greatly alarmed me.
And now we are being told that grocery stores all over the country are attempting to stockpile goods in an attempt to avoid shortages during a second wave of coronavirus
Grocery stores across the United States are stocking up on products to avoid shortages during a second wave of coronavirus.
Household products including paper towels and Clorox wipes have been difficult to find at times during the pandemic, and if grocery stores arent stocked up and prepared for second wave this winter, runs on products and shortages could happen again.
hen even CNN starts admitting that more shortages are coming, that is a sign that it is very late in the game.
And the Wall Street Journal is reporting that some chains are actually putting together pandemic pallets in anticipation of more shortages
According to the Wall Street Journal, Associated Food Stores has recently started building pandemic pallets to ensure cleaning and sanitizing products are readily available in its warehouses to prepare for high demand through the end of the year.
We will never again operate our business as unprepared for something like this, Darin Peirce, vice president of retail operations for the cooperative of more than 400 stores told the outlet. If grocery stores sense something is coming and are preparing for another wave of this scamdemic, it may be something worth taking note of.
Most of these grocery chains believe that another wave of COVID-19 is the worst case scenario that they could possibly be facing. Sadly, that isnt even close to the truth.
We have entered a time when global food supplies are going to become increasingly stressed, and it is going to be absolutely critical to keep U.S. food production at the highest levels possible.
Unfortunately, U.S. farmers have been going bankrupt in staggering numbers during this downturn, and the federal assistance that was supposed to help them survive has mostly gone to large, industrialized farms
Five months into the pandemic, farmers say the federal payments have done little to keep them afloat, as these favor large, industrialized farms over smaller family farms. In fact, initial payments under the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program which provided $16 billion in direct support and $3 billion in purchases revealed an uneven distribution of financial aid.
An NBC News analysis of the first 700,000 payments showed how corporate farms and foreign-owned operations received over $1.2 billion in coronavirus relief or over 20 percent of the money with average payments of almost $95,000. Smaller farms, meanwhile, had average payments of around $300. The figures did not take into account other struggling farmers who are ineligible for assistance.
Reading those numbers greatly frustrated me, because family farms have always been so critical to our success as a nation.
U.S. farm bankruptcies hit an eight-year high last year, and they are on pace to go even higher this year.
This should deeply alarm all of us, because we are going to need as much food production as possible during the years to come.
In 2020, we have just seen one major disaster after another all over the world, and many of these disasters have directly affected global food production. For example, in my previous articles I havent even mentioned the historic flooding that has been going on in China for months that is wiping out crops on a massive scale
Experts from the global financial services group Nomura said that although the flooding is among the worst that China has experienced since 1998, it could still get worse in the weeks to come, with the nation poised to lose $1.7 billion in agricultural production.
However, since the start of the monsoon season, the area of flooded croplands have almost doubled. Nomuras estimates also do not include the potential loss of wheat, corn and other major crops. Therefore, China could be facing a far greater economic loss than current projections.
On my news headlines website, I am going to start posting stories like this on a daily basis so that people can keep up with what is really going on out there.
We really are facing a very serious global food crisis, and the number of people without sufficient food is only going to grow as the months roll along.
For now, most Americans still have plenty of food, and we should be very thankful for that.
But everyone should be able to see that global conditions are rapidly changing, and we should all be using this window of opportunity to prepare, because very, very challenging times are ahead of us.
Guessing SA has never heard of home gardens.
Venezuela had shortages in the recent past. One article featured a farmer and his wife who ran a food truck. Of course, they had a houseful of kids old enough to pull weeds and tend a backyard garden. Yet, their yard, outside some weeds, was barren. Their fridge was empty but they had some huge speakers and wires running everywhere.
When the product came back in the stores about June, our stockpile was depleted enough that we bought one small pack. By July, we were back to sales about every other week. I work in supply chain and can tell you that the main, and possibly only, reason for the PPE shortage like masks and hand sanitizer what that the government was rerouting everything to hospitals.
If you remember Radar O'Reilly on the old M*A*S*H episodes, that was me a few months ago bartering supplies our plant had in surplus with other places, including hospitals, which has more PPE than they could possibly use because the government decided to do the rationing. We made the necessary exchanges without much fuss or fanfare.
Now that Fedzilla has stepped back, it is no longer part of my job and our supply sources are cutting prices on PPE.
***Biden wants American farmers to put their farmland into Gvt land banks.***
Remember the “Soil Bank” of the 1950s? You got paid for not planing anything for ten years. I remember some of the cartoons from that time. One about a rancher as the most successful farmer because he put all his acres in the Soil Bank. The rancher, sitting on his porch, was lighting a cigar with a ten dollar bill.
I remember, around 1975, Progressive Farmer Magazine warning farmers that people in the South better prepare to grow Northern crops as THE COMING ICE AGE would stop all farming in the North.
Thirty five years later the same magazine was crying just the opposite because of Glo-Bull Warming.
Now Descending Into An Ice Age October 1, 2020
https://www.iceagenow.info/now-descending-into-an-ice-age-video/#more-33049
Each bright green dot represents a time when our orbit was the same as now.
Every time I mean, every time the orbit was similar to today, temperatures on our planet had already begun a major descent, or were about to.
Each red line represents major cooling.
You can see four times in the last 400,000 years when our planet has been even warmer than today, (so much for man-made global warming!) and many, many periods of major cooling.
I think you will soon see a fat red line (major cooling) added to the right-hand side of the graph.
Yes, I forgot about that!
What will the Day of the LORD be for you? It will be darkness and not light. It will be like a man who flees from a lion, only to encounter a bear, or who enters his house and rests his hand against the wall, only to be bitten by a snake.
Ol' Amos wasn't kidding, was he?!
[Marxist socialism and state capitalism are one and the same, JFTR.]
When these plants were privatized after Deng Xiaoping ousted Mao’s hand-picked successor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hua_Guofeng#Ousting_and_death in a coup, managers, designers, production engineers, etc, left and set up shop on their own. City and county factories went out of business as their most energetic employees and managers struck out on their own. In some cases, the tooling for the defunct enterprises was bought out by the former employees. But pretty much as soon as they started generating cash, they began importing tooling from Japan, Europe and the US.
China’s government is not at all Marxist. The cradle to grave programs that theoretically covered every single citizen are history. Medical treatment is pay as you go. Housing is whatever buyers can afford. Jobs are whatever they can find in the classifieds. Food is whatever they can buy after paying rent, utilities, school fees, car payments with the cash salaries they receive from the employers at the privately-owned companies where they work.
The closest thing to China’s government today is the very Nationalist government that the Communist Party overthrew. Except the Communist dictatorship is, in many ways, more oppressive than the Nationalists ever were. Basically, the Chinese endured 70+ years of suffering since the Communist victory just to end up with a less-developed and more oppressive version of the Nationalist Party. The cognitive dissonance between the self-congratulatory propaganda of the party and the dreary reality will eventually catch up with the Party. In time, something like Yeltsin’s (himself almost a member of the Politburo) coup against Gorbachev will become a possibility.
Yup. The ethanol thing is disgusting. We subsidize farmers with tax dollars to grow fuel instead of letting them grow food.
[Marxist socialism and state capitalism are one and the same, JFTR.]
Im not so concerned that there are going to be actual shortages, as much as I am concerned about the panic buying caused shortages.
Because the long and short of it is, it doesnt matter what the cause of the shortage is, what matters is that it exists and that things you need/want are no longer available.
From the Amazon description:
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
An extraordinary insight into life under one of the worlds most ruthless and secretive dictatorships and the story of one womans terrifying struggle to avoid capture/repatriation and guide her family to freedom.
As a child growing up in North Korea, Hyeonseo Lee was one of millions trapped by a secretive and brutal communist regime. Her home on the border with China gave her some exposure to the world beyond the confines of the Hermit Kingdom and, as the famine of the 1990s struck, she began to wonder, question and to realise that she had been brainwashed her entire life. Given the repression, poverty and starvation she witnessed surely her country could not be, as she had been told the best on the planet?
Aged seventeen, she decided to escape North Korea. She could not have imagined that it would be twelve years before she was reunited with her family.
Her TED talk presentation on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdxPCeWw75k
More presentations here:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=hyeonseo+lee+ted+talk
In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity.Even nationalism does not stop them from being Marxist; certainly Hitler himself admitted that national socialism is Marxist at its core. A Marxist state is not defined by somehow succeeding at achieving Marxs imaginary society of association or seemingly being further along in implementing the list of planks laid out in the Manifesto.
The Principles of Communism
Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
Fifth plank of communism
As far as I know vegetable cans are steel.
That’s what my magnet tells me.
There very well may be a vegetable can shortage, but it’s not because of aluminum.
They have a "tin" coating which is becoming more expensive and somewhat scarcer than in the past.
[They are Marxist.
In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity.
The Principles of Communism
Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
Fifth plank of communism
Even nationalism does not stop them from being Marxist; certainly Hitler himself admitted that national socialism is Marxist at its core. A Marxist state is not defined by somehow succeeding at achieving Marxs imaginary society of association or seemingly being further along in implementing the list of planks laid out in the Manifesto. ]
This is one of the effects of shutdowns. Food doesn’t grow in the cupboard, or even in the grocery store.
Yes. Still no Lysol spray. And the other thing is why can we not get Libbys pumpkin anywhere. Cant even get it online.
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