Global Food Problems Are About To Get Much Worse
By Michael Snyder/End of the American Dream July 19, 2023
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It was just a matter of time before the grasshoppers joined the party. In 2023, global crops have been devastated by plague after plague. Farmers in the U.S. and elsewhere have had to deal with seemingly endless drought, unprecedented heat, nightmarish flooding and horrifying outbreaks of disease.
In fact, citrus greening disease is one of the primary reasons why the orange harvest in Florida is only going to be about half as large as it was last year. It has just been one thing after another for our farmers, but ravenous hordes of insects has been one plague that has been noticeably absent from the list. Unfortunately, that has now changed.
Just recently, a swarm of grasshoppers that was so enormous that it was actually spotted by weather radar systems descended upon Tooele, Utah...
A massive swarm of grasshoppers has invaded Tooele, Utah, causing significant damage to crops. The plague-like surge was captured by weather radar systems of the National Weather Service on the evening of June 21 as it headed northeast toward the Great Salt Lake.
Alex DeSmet, a meteorologist, told the Salt Lake Tribune that the unusual radar detection of the grasshoppers was associated with their distinctive non-uniform movement. Unlike weather events such as rain or snow, grasshopper swarms exhibit irregular patterns.
Normally, we don't see swarms of this size in North America.
But the warmer and drier winters that we have witnessed in recent years have resulted in a population explosion of the little critters.
So now they have returned in extremely large numbers, and when they arrive on a farm they literally eat everything in sight...
Farmers in the region have been left devastated as the grasshoppers devoured their crops, leaving behind barren fields.
Michael Dow, a rancher in Tooele, shared his dismay. "Every bit of alfalfa that's in my fields is gone. It was bare dirt within a matter of hours," he said. Reports of insect-related troubles have been emerging from the area over the past few weeks.
This is really bad news, because we definitely need good harvests this year.
The global food crisis just continues to get even worse. As I discussed yesterday, the United Nations is telling us that 2.4 billion people do not have enough food to eat right now.
So what will happen if global food supplies get a lot tighter than they are now?
On Monday, Russia decided to suspend the grain export deal that it had with Ukraine...
Russia announced on Monday that it was suspending a crucial deal that allows grain to be exported from Ukraine to countries in Africa and the Middle East.
"The grain deal has halted," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said of the Black Sea Grain Initiative. "As soon as the Russian part of the deal is fulfilled, the Russian side will resume the fulfillment of this deal without delay."
Moscow claimed that the deal had only benefited Ukraine and that Russian exports, such as wheat and fertilizer, had been blocked from foreign markets due to Western sanctions.
This deal was so important, because it had allowed the Ukrainians to export 36.2 million tons of agricultural products since August...
The Black Sea Grain Initiative, brokered by the U.N. and Turkey, has allowed 36.2 million tons of food to be exported from Ukraine since August, more than half to developing countries, according to the Joint Coordination Center in Istanbul.
So now there will be even less food to go around.
I don't think that this deal would have collapsed if the Ukrainians had been able to restrain themselves.
Instead of limiting hostilities to the war zones, Ukraine just keeps hitting civilian targets deep inside Russian-held territory. For example, the Ukrainians just conducted yet another attack on the Kerch Bridge...
A Ukrainian security official has claimed Kyiv's responsibility for an attack on the bridge linking the annexed Crimean peninsula to the Russian mainland - a vital supply line for Russia's war effort in Ukraine and a personal project for President Vladimir Putin.
The nearly 12-mile crossing, also known as the Kerch Bridge, is the longest in Europe and holds huge strategic and symbolic importance for Moscow. Monday's attack on the bridge was the second since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, after a fuel tanker exploded while crossing it in October.
A source in Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) told CNN this attack was a joint operation of the SBU and Ukraine's naval forces. The source spoke on condition of anonymity because they had not received authorization to speak on the record.
It is a war, and so the Ukrainians are free to do this.
But the Ukrainians should not expect that the Russians will just stand by and allow them to export their grain through the Black Sea if civilian infrastructure is being targeted.
Hitting civilian infrastructure is not going to help Ukraine win the war. But it does greatly upset the Russians, and now Ukraine cannot export grain through the Black Sea any longer.
Global food prices have risen to crazy levels, and they will soon go even higher.
In the UK, one consumer group says that prices on some food items have already increased by up to 175 percent since 2021...
A consumer group in the United Kingdom has alerted the country's authorities to the parabolic spike in food costs over the last two years, requesting immediate action to protect consumers amid the country's unparalleled cost-of-living crisis and surging inflation. According to a report published on Sunday by the consumer group Which?, some food costs have risen by 175% since 2021.
The organization discovered that food and drink costs grew by 25.8% on average between June 2021 and June 2023 after investigating eight large department stores, including Tesco and Lidl. It stated that the figure was derived from an examination of over 21,000 food and beverage products.
This is a global problem.
And there is no solution in sight.
In fact, as I have extensively detailed, global famine is on the way no matter what our leaders do now.
But most people do not want to hear such things.
Most people just want to hear that everything is going to be just fine, and the mainstream media dutifully obliges day after day...
Originally published at End Of The American Dream - reposted with permission.
