The growing scarcity and why you should stock some food.
Not enough to go around !
For a couple of days I have been pondering if I should write this one, and then if it should be more opinionated or just (autistic) analysis. Decided for the first, and why you should start to seriously consider stocking some food. This obviously ties with many of my other pieces not related to the other subjects I cover.
It is no secret the world has been facing a massive energy crunch, with so signs of relenting any time soon, and no type of system, organic or not, can function without energy, in fact, inefficient use of energy is what collapses any form of a complex system, inefficient, faulty use of bioenergy is the main driver of the Covid pathology.
South Asian countries are having a hard time securing fuel or financing right now while they most need access to both, which is one of the smaller causes of the collapse of the Sri Lanka economy. Europe isn’t in a better place, not only planning a cut on the usage of energy, but the prices of energy in Europe are soaring, and they are bound to get higher all year round, regardless. Even Centrica is changing how it sells power and natural gas.
Centrica Plc will stop selling power and natural gas to its biggest business customers as surging wholesale energy costs erode profit margins at the UK utility.
European Union countries reached a political agreement to cut their gas use by 15% through next winter as the prospect of a full cut-off from Russian supplies grows increasingly likely.
Energy ministers meeting in Brussels gave the green light to a proposal to voluntarily cut their gas usage over the next months, the Czech presidency of the EU said in a post on Twitter.
Well, hopefully, a decline in 15% of energy usage won’t have any type of deleterious effect on essential industries, especially ones related to food production. Source for the below. This is not an energy-centric piece though.
Germany's BASF (BASFn.DE), the world's largest chemical company, is cutting ammonia production further due to soaring natural gas prices, it said on Wednesday, with potential ramifications from farming to fizzy drinks.
BASF cut ammonia output in Sept, now reducing it further
Yara's ammonia output across Europe is 27% below capacity
SKW, Ineos say monitoring situation closely
The biggest European fertilizer producers are all drastically reducing fertilizer production, further, because they have been doing that for months now, every few months the price of energy spiked so much, that they had to cut some of the production so as not to pass the full costs of production (which nobody would be able to afford).
I randomly found this amazing graph, so you understand how everything comes into play here. Lack of fertilizer usage, cost of fuel, and the weather add to an explosive mixture (or rather a scarce meal).
The weather is severely affecting crops. Which wouldn’t be a surprise if you read my Substack.
What Will 14 Inches of Rain in One Day Do to Crops? These Pictures Will Make Your Stomach Turn
From drought to fooding overnight, fields located northwest of St. Louis, Mo. are proof too much rain is not a good thing, especially when it falls in a matter of hours. Farmers on both the Missouri and Illinois side surrounding St. Louis went from worried about drought robbing their yields to flood waters wiping out their crops in one day.
From Drought to Flooding
The area was far from perfect before the rains hit. The latest U.S. Drought Monitor showed the area was between abnormally dry to moderate drought. However, area farmers had a different story, as the dryness was taking a toll on their crops.
"We were in severe drought, the corn was beginning to fire," says Allen. "We were starting to transition to soybeans and hope for the best. We knew the corn wasn’t going to be good."
Hungary harvests 3.9 mln tonnes of wheat, maize and sunflower crop 'at serious risk' from drought
Many other countries are faced with the same problem, the drastic shifts in weather, out-of-season rains, or massive droughts have impacted crops at alarming levels. And this gives a triple-fold problem. One, this affects the nutritional value of food, food will not only have a different taste, but it will be less nutritional (this is a massive problem right now).
Second, yield. Yes, the world might have been experiencing decent yields (even though there is massive manipulation of numbers because of the futures market), but at the end of the year, the yield will have a sizable drop, as I mentioned months ago, I expect roughly 9% to 15% of drop, this will lead us to the third problem.
The third problem is the biggest one. Expensive fuel/energy, high cost of fertilizers, and lower yield mean only one thing. Not enough food to feed the entire world next year.
What you are seeing on the shelves right now is past season’s stock, all the dynamics I covered the last few months have yet to be fully played to the consumer. In fact, the entire planet is seeing inflation in food skyrocketing, from failed countries like Sri Lanka to Denmark.
How bad will the global food crisis get?
Now even the “experts”, alongside a huge portion of others are seeing and stating what we have been discussing here for months, that the actual impact on food availability and the very real chance of scarcity, and their analysis only take into account past dynamics, think we already covered, have taken into account and mapped possible outcomes. They are ignoring things like this, where Trudeau insists on pushing its fertilizer emissions cut, severely impacting grain output, but don’t worry, I wish this was a problem for just Canada.
American politicians are now attempting to pass a law with very similar end results, but different ways of doing it, by paying farmers, not using legislation and fines to cut production. Many other dynamics that will impact all this will come into play but I will cover these in another piece.
But the focus here was rather simple, alongside all my other pieces, to convince you to start stocking at least some food, prices are not as bad as they will get, there is still enough food available that stocking will be a blip on nobody’s radar. This won’t be merely a lack of options, but a lack of staples, the major stables on the planet, and resource nationalism will come again, and again because most politicians woke up to the fact that the poorer the population, the less likely they are to actually accept stringent living conditions, massive inflation, and the trade-off is no food.
If I am wrong, the worst outcome is I made you safe a few hundred bucks because you were early on buying before inflation hit the world. If I am right, well, you can quite well know where I am going with this.
I will also leave the reader with these two pieces. (Something I warned about months ago).
Spain Urges NATO to Address Threats from North Africa
Southern European states including Italy and Spain are urging NATO allies to address threats from North Africa, after the alliance agreed on a new "strategic concept" at its summit last week in Madrid.
'Hostile actors'
While the war in Ukraine dominates NATO's agenda, member states bordering the Mediterranean want the alliance to prepare for other potential flashpoints from the south, including a rapid increase in irregular migration. Spain warned it could be used as a pressure tactic by what it called "hostile actors."
Hundreds of migrants attempted to breach the border fence separating the Spanish enclave of Melilla from Morocco last month. At least 23 people died during the attempted crossing. The migrants, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa, are desperate to reach Europe to claim asylum and find a better life.
Record number of people worldwide are moving toward starvation, U.N. warns
The spike in food, fuel and fertilizer prices sparked by the war in Ukraine is threatening to push countries around the world into famine, bringing "global destabilization, starvation and mass migration on an unprecedented scale," a top U.N. official warned Wednesday.
David Beasley, head of the U.N. World Food Program, said its latest analysis shows that "a record 345 million acutely hungry people are marching to the brink of starvation" — a 25% increase from 276 million at the start of 2022 before Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. The number stood at 135 million before the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020.
The situation isn’t dire so far, and yet, the hordes are still coming. There will be hundreds of thousands to millions next year, all wanting food. Food even rich countries can’t afford to share or send.
I will leave you with my first opinion piece, I suggest that new readers read it, and old readers revisit it.
I hope you heed my words and seriously think about stocking some food. Kynurenine Part II coming on the weekend, until then, have a very nice weekend.
A very big thank you to all supporters here and those who use KoFi =) !
Stock and sow. Thank you for the reminder. Out goes the unused trampoline, in goes the garden.
experimental studies suggest that not only does malnutrition suppress the host's immune response to virus, but that it may also facilitate the emergence of novel viral variants, which display increased pathogenicity relative to the original parental strain (Beck et al., 2004).