Global Food Shortages Are Becoming Very Real, And U.S. Grocery Store Chains Are Preparing For Worst Case Scenarios

eotad ^ | 9/29/20 | Michael Snyder

[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 isn’t 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 didn’t 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 couldn’t feed his family. Matilde Alonso knew it was true but couldn’t 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 didn’t have anything to give her.

Many of us can’t even imagine being in Matilde Alonso’s 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 aren’t 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 isn’t 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 haven’t 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. Nomura’s 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.

[bgill]

Guessing SA has never heard of home gardens.

[bgill]

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.

[Vigilanteman]

My wife and I made it a point to buy one of those big jumbo packs of toilet paper every time it came on sale, which seemed to be about every other week. During the worst of the shortage, we just went to our stockpile.

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.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

***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.

[SmokingJoe]

So they can end economy killing lockdowns and let workers back to work. Things were just about even in most South American countries without lockdowns. You bring in lockdowns and put people out of bu and out of work and everything goes to sh*t.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

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.

[amorphous]

Expecting a tough winter.

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.

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Video (poorly done) at link.

[TribalPrincess2U]

Yes, I forgot about that!

[amorphous]

My SHTF home is there and all you have to do is google some news to see the violence.

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?!

[Zhang Fei]

[Marxist socialism and “state capitalism” are one and the same, JFTR.]

---

China’s not Marxist, except rhetorically. Government-owned corporations are the exception rather than the rule there. The place is crawling with entrepreneurs. In ball bearings, there are 2,000 distinct companies making ball bearings in just one province:

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https://www.bearing-news.com/buying-chinese-bearings-know/
[The world bearing industry is dominated by multibillion-dollar multinational bearing producers. China on the other hand is dominated by thousands of bearing producers, all ranging in their capabilities. To give you perspective, there are over 2,000 producers in Jiangsu Province alone. ]

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The country has 34 provinces. They don’t all have 2,000 bearing producers each, but every province has its own industrial sector - remnants from an era where Mao attempted to spread industrial plant out so that if China sustained a large scale nuclear attack, its surviving industrial plant could continue producing items necessary to keep the economy and the war effort going.

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.

[Cobra64]

Yup. The ethanol thing is disgusting. We subsidize farmers with tax dollars to grow fuel instead of letting them grow food.

[Zhang Fei]

[Marxist socialism and “state capitalism” are one and the same, JFTR.]

---

The question might be asked - if it’s not Marxist, why does the Communist Party not change its name and renounce Marxism? It’s like the divine right of kings. Once you back away from it, you’re setting yourself up for a loss of power. How many kings who liberalized have managed to keep their dictatorial powers? Just about none. Communist countries are just monarchies. The Lenin in Marxist-Leninist was just a pretext for installing a king at the head of communist regimes. Senior party members are just aristocrats with hereditary privileges. Xi Jinping himself is a communist blue blood who would not have become party chief without his father’s high rank.

[metmom]

I’m 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 doesn’t matter what the cause of the shortage is, what matters is that it exists and that things you need/want are no longer available.

[amorphous]

If you're interested in what it's like growing up and escaping a truely communistic country like North Korea, I highly recommend the book by Hyeonseo Lee who escaped at the age of seventeen called, "The Girl with Seven Names." The kindle version was free (at one time - not sure if it still is) for Prime members.

From the Amazon description:

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

An extraordinary insight into life under one of the world’s most ruthless and secretive dictatorships – and the story of one woman’s 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.

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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

[Olog-hai]

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 Marx’s imaginary society of “association” or seemingly being further along in implementing the list of planks laid out in the Manifesto.

[Do_Tar]

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.

[amorphous]

As far as I know vegetable cans are steel.

They have a "tin" coating which is becoming more expensive and somewhat scarcer than in the past.

[Zhang Fei]

[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 Marx’s imaginary society of “association” or seemingly being further along in implementing the list of planks laid out in the Manifesto. ]

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You’re assuming that words use people as tools to get what they want. I think people use words as tools to get what they want - power, prestige, fame, et al. Marxism, divine right of kings, national socialism - all are pretexts to get to the top. They’re just horses to which claimants to the throne have hitched their wagons.

[lepton]

This is one of the effects of shutdowns. Food doesn’t grow in the cupboard, or even in the grocery store.

[Persevero]

Yes. Still no Lysol spray. And the other thing is why can we not get Libby’s pumpkin anywhere. Can’t even get it online.