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Sept. 22, 2022 - Epoch Times

16:15

A List Of 33 Things We Know About The Coming Food Shortages

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	Good evening.
	This right here is an American supermarket store shelf filled to the brim with food.
	However, unbeknownst to most people, there are major problems coming down the pipe in regards to global food production.
	Problems that might turn these supermarket store shelves into something that looks more like this.
	That's because over the past several months, many different factors have all worked together to make the amount of food produced this year substantially less than normal.
	And it goes without saying that food which is not being produced in the year 2022 will not be on our supermarket store shelves in the year 2023.
	But it gets even deeper than that, because the reality is that within the next year, we are potentially facing an unprecedented worldwide food crisis with, again, the vast majority of the population not even being aware of it.
	And if you think that might sound too alarmist, well, here was Joe Biden himself just a few months back.
	With regard to food shortages, yes, we did talk about food shortages.
	And it's going to be real.
	The price of these sanctions is not just imposed upon Russia.
	It's imposed upon an awful lot of countries as well, including European countries and our country as well.
	And so in order to set the stage free properly, let's go through the things that we know about the coming food shortages point by point, starting with the drought that America has been experiencing this summer, which has led to a huge decline in production, with, in fact, the American Farm Bureau Federation suggesting that yields could be down by as much as a third compared with last year.
	Now, that's a third overall.
	However, if we dig down into some of the specific crops, we find that things like American corn is on track to produce its lowest yield since the drought year of 2012.
	And even more amazingly, this year's hard red winter wheat crop is expected to be the smallest since the year 1963.
	Think about that.
	The smallest wheat crop since the year 1963, back when America had a population of only 100%.
	The fact that in the Sacramento River Valley of California, the rice harvest is expected to be half of what it would be in a normal year.
	Specifically, according to the California Rice Commission, out of the 500,000 acres that are normally produced, only 250,000 acres will be harvested this year.
	Think about that.
	That's quite literally a 50% reduction in the amount of rice that will be produced this year.
	And the reason for this drastic drop is the lack of water that farmers have at their disposal.
	And to give you an example of how drastic these water cuts actually are, Mr.
	Kurt Richter, who's a fourth-generation farmer as well as the vice president of Richter Farms, which is again in the Sacramento River Valley over in California, he recently told a local media that, quote, he keeps a meter on the ranch to monitor how much water he uses on his crops, water that's allocated from the Federal Bureau of Reclamation.
	He said a normal low year for him would be a 75% water supply.
	This year, for his part of the valley, it was an 18% water supply.
	However, it's worth mentioning that not all these water cuts are due to drought.
	But instead, what appears to be happening over in California is that environmentalist groups have diverted an extraordinary amount of water to protect certain species of fish that they have designated as being quote-unquote endangered.
	Although whether they are endangered or not is not exactly clear.
	What is clear, though, is that the state bureaucrats are denying water for farming and diverting it to the ocean.
	On a side note, I was actually in California over the last several days talking to the farmers out there We're good to go.
	It's a disaster.
	For instance, due to these water shortages, many crops are having to compete for an increasingly limited supply of water, leading many farmers to make, you can say, tough decisions.
	Here is, for instance, what one farmer over in California said regarding his tomato crop.
	"Even the river water has been cut back.
	Other crops are competing for that same water, other crops that have better returns.
	On my own farm, we've cut back from 2,000 acres of tomatoes in 2020 to 900 last year.
	This year, we have only 530 acres of canning tomatoes.
	And this particular farmer's experience, well, it mirrors what's happening in the nation as a whole, regarding tomatoes at least.
	In fact, according to a recent estimate from the USDA, the tomato harvest this year in 2022 will be 10.5 million tons, which sounds like a lot, until you consider that it's more than a million tons short of a normal season, which will then naturally be reflected not only in the produce section of the supermarket, but also in the price of which will then naturally be reflected not only in the produce section of the supermarket, but also in the Furthermore, if you think you can avoid these shortages by eating non-tomato-based foods, well, you can try.
	But consider the shortages of other crops as well.
	According to analysts with Rabobank, which deals heavily with the agriculture industry, here in the US, the harvest area of the latest potato crop is projected to be down 4% from last year.
	And just for your reference, last year's crop was already the lowest in a decade.
	Their analysts also found that the year-to-year shipments of carrots is down 45%, shipments of sweet corn is down 20%, sweet potatoes are down 13%, celery is down 11%, and according to the USDA, total peach production was down 15% from last year.
	In short, in regards to farmers, the American Farm Bureau Federation conducted a survey, and they found that nearly three-quarters of them, of U.S. farmers, say that this year's drought is hurting their harvest.
	And again, you have to keep in mind that the agriculture business is cyclical, meaning that as a consumer, while you might not feel a poor harvest right away in your supermarket store shelves, you will likely feel it next year.
	However, you might say, okay, if there's not enough vegetables, or if vegetables get too expensive, that's...
	And in theory, that is a solution.
	But it probably won't work.
	Because this lack of water is hurting the cattle industry just as much, and will very likely lead to both massively increased prices as well as actual shortages of beef within the next year.
	And in terms of why this is, well, according to Ms.
	Sarah Little...
	Who's the spokeswoman for the North American Meat Institute, she explained it this way in an interview with MSM, quote,"...when weather is dry and hot, there's not enough natural feed to go around.
	To sustain a herd, ranchers must bring in hay, and feed prices soar, prompting ranchers to sell their animals a little early and often to sell heifers, the young females, rather than keep them as breeding stock.
	This has resulted in lower beef prices for consumers in the short term, but signals that there probably will be a tighter supply next year." And indeed, according to a recent survey from the American Farm Bureau, they found large declines in cattle herds across many different states, with the three largest ones being Texas, reporting a whopping 50% decrease, followed by New Mexico, which is down 43%, and Oregon, which is down 41%.
	Largely due to the sudden scarcity in both forage as well as water for cows, as well as overall massive inflation.
	Here's what the spokeswoman for the North American Meat Institute said on this front, quote,"...producers are especially hard hit because food, fuel, and fertilizer costs have been rising.
	So, although they are getting record prices for cattle, inflation has hurt their income." But again, regardless of the reason, whether it's water supply issues, the price of feed, or general inflation, the end result is a lower supply of cattle, which can lead to both shortages of beef as well as massively increased beef prices.
	And in terms of the price of beef, beef producers out in Oklahoma, they are predicting that cheap ground beef, basically the lowest type of beef that you can buy, will be $50 per pound in the very near future.
	And the rationale for this is quite simple.
	Quote, If it costs $200 to feed and raise a cow in 2021 to a market value of $600, imagine what the value will have to be when 2022's herd hit the same market seeking the same profit margin.
	If it costs, let's say, $400 to feed and raise that same cow, it'll need to fetch a finished price in a fair comparison because each farm and ranch in America is a small business that must profit to survive or cease to exist.
	However, the problems go much, much deeper than that.
	But before I present them to you, let me quickly show you this beautiful coin.
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	And typically, I order at least one of these from our sponsor, American Heart for Gold, every single month.
	The reason I do so is because, I mean, as you likely know, the inflation rate in this country is the highest that it's been in, what, the last 40 years now.
	Everything, like the price of food, The price of housing, the price of gas is absolutely going through the roof.
	And in fact, market experts like the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, he's not only predicting a recession, but he's even using words like unprecedented economic hurricane.
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	So pick up the phone and call 866-242-2352.
	That's 866-242-2352.
	Or text Roman to 65532.
	The link will also be down in the description box below.
	And then let's head on back to the studio.
	However, being a smart consumer, naturally enough, you see the situation and you might very likely switch to chicken, since it's less expensive.
	Which is a good strategy, except for the fact that chicken is also up double digits.
	For instance, the wholesale price of boneless, skinless chicken breasts are currently sitting at around $1.91 per pound, compared to $0.93 per pound last year, which is a two-fold increase.
	And while chicken is generally less expensive than beef, if next year, all of a sudden, millions of Americans in this country rush over to buy chicken, well, the principles of basic economics will naturally catapult the price of chicken to the moon.
	And this, frankly, all comes at the worst possible time, because already Americans are, quite literally, going into debt to buy groceries.
	For instance, according to a report that was published in the Daily Mail newspaper, there is a phone-based app called Zip, which allows people to make purchases and then pay for them over time.
	Sort of a buy now, pay later scheme.
	And according to that report, Zip had a 95% increase in the purchase of groceries using their service here in the U.S.
	A 95% increase in the number of people taking out microloans just to pay for groceries.
	Which might sound bad, but it's better than not being able to afford food at all, which is the case for many other Americans.
	In fact, over the past year, as inflation has eaten away at many people's standard of living, the demand for food banks has just skyrocketed.
	For instance, as just one example, the CEO of the North Texas Food Bank, she recently told CBS News that demand for her food bank is, quote, And this problem that she's seeing at her food bank in North Texas is actually mirrored across the entire nation.
	Because while in 2019, there were approximately 40 million Americans who relied on food banks, in the year 2021, that number went all the way up to 53 million.
	Meaning that in the span of just two years, 13 million new Americans were no longer able to afford essential items at their supermarket store shelves.
	And you can only imagine how all these massive food problems that are coming down the pipeline will exacerbate this particular problem.
	However, the silver lining to all this is that here in America, we're actually blessed with some of the best land on the entire globe and some of the most productive and innovative farmers in the entire world.
	And with about half of our land being devoted to things like farming and ranching, in general, we should be able to pull through, regardless of how little attention politicians are giving this matter.
	Meaning that while there might be things like food shortages on our supermarket store shelves and spikes in the price of goods, very likely no one is going to starve to death.
	That's the good news.
	However, the bad news is that this fact is not true throughout the entire world.
	Because the problems here in the U.S. are only a small subset of the problems that farmers are facing globally.
	For instance, Europe is currently facing a historic drought, leading many rivers to quite literally dry up, which then, naturally enough, leads their crop yields to plummet, such as the corn production for the entirety of the European Union being down by as much as one-fifth this year.
	France is bracing for crop losses of as much as 35%.
	In the UK and some parts of Germany, that number might be as high as 50%.
	Agriculture production in Somalia will be down by about 80% this year.
	In Eastern Africa, their non-stop droughts have already resulted in the deaths of at least 7 million animals.
	China is experiencing massive droughts as well, leading to a severely reduced crop.
	India, which normally accounts for about 40% of the global rice trade, is warning of severely decreased yields in the year 2022.
	And of course, you have the Ukraine-Russia war, which has sent the price of fertilizer skyrocketing, while at the same time, the grain that Ukraine and Russia typically supply to nations like Africa has just been tied up in ports.
	And when you add all this up, you get a looming disaster of global proportions, with many prosperous countries like America, countries in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, etc., suffering shortages and increased prices, while less developed countries, like countries in Africa and Latin America, facing actual starvation.
	Which can then, naturally enough, lead to massive migration waves from places like Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia into other countries, like in Europe, the US, and Australia, and so on.
	And this migration would very likely set off a vicious feedback loop, wherein you have farmers leaving these poor areas to come to the West, making it so that there is even less food for everyone back home in their home countries.
	And then of course the resources of the nations that they're going to in the West will be stretched to the limit, leading to potential problems and conflicts that we can't even yet foresee.
	Meaning, in short, that if this global food crisis is not solved soon, well, we face massive problems within the next several years.
	And that's, quite frankly, putting it lightly.
	If you'd like to go deeper into this story, I'll throw all my research links down into the description box below this video so you can comb through them for yourself.
	And also, I'd like to give a big shout out to two people, Mr.
	Michael Snyder, who runs a blog called The Economic Collapse, and he put a lot of this research together, as well as Mr.
	Eric Schumacher, who also helped quite a bit with the research for today's episode.
	And lastly, I'd like to mention that over the last several months, my team and I have been traveling across the globe.
	We've gone to the Netherlands to speak with farmers there.
	We've gone to Sri Lanka in order to speak to the farmers and the ministers of agriculture there.
	And we've gone to many places throughout the U.S., such as Texas, Minnesota, California, and so on, to speak to the farmers and ranchers throughout this country.
	In order to really paint a picture of this kind of globalist attack on farming, and not only the causes behind it, but also what these globalists are planning for the future.
	It's something I'm putting together.
	It's going to be a long-form documentary that will really lay out the picture of what is coming down the pipe, as well as the type of ideology that's fueling it.
	If you want to check it out, we'll be publishing that over on Epic TV, which is our awesome No Censorship video platform.
	The link will be right there at the very top of the description box.
	And also, I'd like to mention that besides this documentary, which is going to be awesome, and it'll publish probably within the next month and a half, over on Epic TV, we have a plethora of other content that, due to the regime of censorship here on YouTube, we just can never publish on this platform.
	In fact, I myself, I publish somewhere between two to three exclusive episodes of Facts Matter over on Epic TV, episodes that we just cannot publish here on YouTube.
	Again, just because...
	Not necessarily because they're not true, because they are.
	Of course, our show is very fact-based, but just because the algorithm here on this platform just picks up certain keywords, and if they don't like a certain keyword, well, they just block that episode.
	In fact, we had an episode two or three episodes ago here on YouTube where we interviewed two members of Congress about January 6 prisoners.
	I think there's nothing more relevant than that and nothing more newsworthy.
	However...
	YouTube decided to age-restrict it.
	Meaning, if you want to watch that episode, you have to click on it, confirm your age, confirm that you want to watch it, and only then will the episode play.
	That's what I call soft censorship.
	And so if you want to sort of escape this regime of censorship and check out all the awesome content that we have, well, the link will be right there at the very top of the description box.
	I hope you check it out.
	And then, until next time, I'm your host, Roman from the Epoch Times.

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