(The Economic Collapse Blog)—If your family was on the verge of starving to death, to what extremes would you be willing to go in order to get food? Some of the things that I am going to share with you in this article may make you cringe. But you need to understand what people are willing to do when they get extremely desperate and extremely hungry, because the global food crisis that has already begun is going to greatly intensify in the years ahead. Hundreds of millions of people go to bed hungry every single night, and children are literally dropping dead from starvation on the other side of the globe right now. Unfortunately, most people in the western world don’t even realize that this is going on because the corporate media rarely reports on it.
War, pestilence, natural disasters, bizarre weather patterns and historic crop failures are creating a “perfect storm” for global food production. It is being projected that later this year things will get really bad in some of the poorest areas of the planet, and the long-term outlook is even worse.
When people get hungry enough, they will literally eat just about anything. On Monday, I was stunned to learn that a team of archaeologists has discovered that settlers at Jamestown in the 17th Century actually resorted to eating dogs in a desperate attempt to survive…
The first English settlers to arrive in North America ate dogs to survive an extreme period of starvation, according to a gruesome new study.
Researchers at the University of Iowa discovered the remains of 16 indigenous dogs at an archaeological site in Jamestown, Virginia, that strongly suggest the 17th Century settlers ate at least six canines.
Their remains showed hallmark signs that the colonists had skinned the animals, dismembered their limbs and removed the flesh from their bones between 1609 and 1617 AD, the team said.
For many of you, this level of savagery may be difficult to grasp. Sadly, it appears that what the archaeologists found is backed up by written testimony from one of the original settlers of the colony…
By the spring of 1610, only about 60 of the original colonists were still alive and George Percy – one of the original settlers – authored an account of what occurred in the wake of the starvation period.
‘Now all of us at James Town, beginning to feel that sharp prick of hunger which no man truly describe but he which has tasted the bitterness thereof.
‘… Then having fed upon horses and other beasts as long as they lasted, we were glad to make shift with vermin as dogs, cats, rats, and mice,’ Percy wrote in excerpts of his account called ‘Starving Time,’ archived by the National Humanities Center.
What would you do if you were in their shoes?
This is one of the reasons why I am encouraging my readers to store up food while they still can. I never want any of you to be in a position where you are faced with such choices.
A global food crisis is already here. More than a billion people in Africa already do not have enough food to eat on a regular basis, and 30 percent of the children on the entire continent suffer from stunted growth.
In East Africa, some of those that are starving “are resorting to consuming grass and peanut shells”…
The U.N. World Food Program (WFP) says that in Darfur, Sudan there are reports of children dying of malnutrition.
“The situation is dire. People are resorting to consuming grass and peanut shells. If assistance doesn’t reach them soon, we risk witnessing widespread starvation and death in Darfur and across other conflict-affected areas in Sudan,” said Michael Dunford, WFP East Africa director.
In other areas of Sudan, people on the brink of starvation are literally eating dirt…
There is so little food in some areas of Sudan that people are taking extreme measures to survive.
In the Al Lait refugee camp, they are eating dirt.
Yes, you read that correctly. So I don’t want anyone out there trying to tell me that the global food crisis isn’t serious.
One 41-year-old man in Sudan says that his wife and children are so hungry that they have been rolling dirt into a ball and swallowing it with water…
Akok, 41, reached Al Lait in December, but has no work and can’t feed the family. At times, they go two or three days without eating. When that happens, Akok said, he watches helplessly as his wife and children dig holes in the ground with a stick, slide their hands in and grab some soil. Then they roll the soil into a ball, put it in their mouths and swallow it with water.
“I keep telling them not to do it, but it’s hunger,” he said. “There is nothing I can do.”
What would you do if you and your family were in a similar position?
In West Africa and Central Africa, it is being projected that approximately 55 million hungry people “will struggle to feed themselves in the coming months”…
Soaring prices have helped fuel a food crisis in West and Central Africa, where nearly 55 million people will struggle to feed themselves in the coming months, U.N. humanitarian agencies warned Friday.
The number facing hunger during the June-August lean season has quadrupled over the last five years, they said, noting that economic challenges such as double-digit inflation and stagnating local production had become major drivers of the crisis, beyond recurrent conflicts in the region.
In areas south of there, widespread crop failures caused by drought have created a tremendous nightmare…
Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Malawi each declared national disasters as crops failed in a region where 70 percent of smallholder farmers rely on rainfed agriculture for their livelihood. Food prices have risen up to 82 percent in some drought-affected areas, while water scarcity has also impacted livestock and destroyed farmland. According to a United Nations report, more than 18 million people are now in need of urgent humanitarian assistance, with food insecurity levels set to increase dramatically during the regular lean season that typically starts in October. This year, the lean season could begin as early as July as provisions are depleted.
North Africa is doing fine for now, but most of the rest of the continent is in enormous trouble.
The good news is that we aren’t facing widespread starvation here in the western world.
But 42 million Americans are on food stamps, and 1 out of every 7 children is living in poverty.
So our problems are growing too.
Unfortunately, the long-term trends that are driving the global food crisis are only going to intensify in the years ahead, and eventually there will be very serious food shortages here in the United States.
What will you do when that day finally arrives?
We have already reached a point where fast food is considered to be a “luxury” and the prices of many popular food items have more than doubled.
Our world is simply not producing enough food for everyone, and global supplies of food are going to get tighter and tighter during the very difficult days that are in front of us.
Sound off about this article on the Based Underground Substack.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
He forgot about cannibalism – quote / paraphrase Matt Brakken – after about 2 weeks with no food people turn to cannibalism . As much as he’s been around I wounder what he saw ?