(End of the American Dream)—The tremendous suffering that we are seeing all over the world right now is only just the beginning. As I have documented repeatedly, we are in the midst of the worst global food crisis in modern history, and we haven’t seen this many countries engaged in military conflict since World War II. In other words, this is a time of famine, and it is a time of war. This represents a major problem for those that believe that humans are intrinsically good and that humanity is moving into a new golden era of peace and prosperity. If humans are intrinsically good, why is there so much evil all around us? Of course the truth is that the evil that we see all around is the product of the evil in human hearts. Humanity is the reason why there is so much war, so much famine, so much greed, so much corruption, and so much suffering.
While billionaires in the western world live the high life, vast hordes of people on the other side of the planet are literally starving to death.
In Sudan, right now more than 25 million people “are facing high levels of acute food insecurity”…
In addition to the threat of violence, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification reported that 25.6 million people in Sudan are facing high levels of acute food insecurity, and 8.5 million people are facing emergency food shortages. The IPC also warned about the risk of famine across 14 areas, impacting residents and refugees in areas like Greater Darfur and Greater Kordofan.
There have been some nightmarish famines in Sudan before, but this is the worst.
The CEO of World Vision, Edgar Sandoval, says that people in Sudan are literally fighting over anthills because it is the only source of food available in some cases…
Sandoval also met another mother and her son, who weighed only 26 pounds. He said his heart broke as the mother wept, telling Sandoval that people in her community are fighting each other over anthills because they’re so hungry. She said they’ll eat the millets stored there by the ants.
“And they’re fighting for that as the only source of food,” Sandoval said. “I think that speaks to the level of desperation that the Sudanese people are facing. It’s the situation that children and moms in particular are facing.”
Can you imagine what it would be like to be that hungry?
And can you imagine what it would be like to watch your own children beg for food?
It is being reported that 730,000 children in Sudan are at “imminent risk of dying”…
In June, the United Nations Children’s Fund announced that nearly 9 million children in Sudan face acute food insecurity and access to safe drinking water. More than 3,800 children have been killed since the fighting escalated in April 2023, and almost 4 million children under the age of 5 are suffering from acute malnutrition, with 730,000 projected to be at an “imminent risk of dying.”
When I try to explain what is happening in Sudan to clueless people here in the western world, they look at me like I am from outer space.
Many of them have never heard about the hordes of people starving on the other side of the planet because the mainstream media is absolutely obsessed with talking about Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
But this is really happening.
As I discussed in a previous article, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations is warning that over 2.5 million people could starve to death in Darfur and Kordofan alone by the end of September…
The Ethiopian famine killed a million people between 1983 and 1985, according to UN estimates. Thomas-Greenfield said that in a worst-case scenario, a famine in Sudan could become even more lethal.
“We’ve seen mortality projections estimating that in excess of 2.5 million people, about 15% of the population in Darfur and Kordofan – the hardest hit regions – could die by the end of September,” the ambassador said.
“This is the largest humanitarian crisis on the face of the planet. And yet, somehow, it threatens to get worse,” she added.
Meanwhile, military conflicts all over the world just continue to intensify.
The Russians continue to gain ground in several areas of eastern Ukraine, and this is making a number of Ukraine’s neighbors very nervous.
In fact, the head of the Polish military just stated that his forces need to prepare for “full-scale conflict”…
Poland needs to prepare its soldiers for all-out conflict, its armed forces chief of staff said on Wednesday, as the country boosts the number of troops on its border with Russia and Belarus.
Poland’s relations with Russia and its ally Belarus have deteriorated sharply since Moscow sent tens of thousands of troops into neighboring Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, starting a war that is still being fought.
“Today, we need to prepare our forces for full-scale conflict, not an asymmetric-type conflict,” army chief of staff General Wieslaw Kukula told a press conference.
Of course Poland is a member of NATO, and so if Poland ends up fighting Russia we will be fighting Russia too.
This week, Chinese forces are engaged in very alarming military exercises that are taking place just miles from the Polish border…
Belarus and China kicked off 11-day joint military training exercises Monday, Belarus’ defense ministry said – with activities taking place just miles from the border of Poland, a NATO and European Union member.
The joint anti-terrorist training “Attacking Falcon” exercises in Belarus would see military personnel from both countries “act together” as one unit in certain stages, Maj. Gen. Vadim Denisenko of the Belarusian military said in a Telegram post.
I think that Chinese forces are there to ward off a potential invasion of Belarus.
Ukraine has been building up large numbers of troops and vast quantities of equipment near the border with Belarus for quite some time, and there had been fears that Ukraine may try to do something really stupid. In fact, officials in Belarus were so concerned that they were publicly warning that they would use tactical nuclear weapons if they were invaded.
Meanwhile, NATO has started delivering F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine…
NATO allies on Wednesday announced they had started transferring F-16 jets to Ukraine and stepped up promises to Kyiv on eventual membership in the alliance at a 75th anniversary summit clouded by political uncertainties in the United States.
In response, Russia has been bombing the daylights out of the airfields where those F-16 fighter jets were supposed to be based.
I really wish that leaders on both sides would sit down and try to find a peaceful way out of this mess.
But that isn’t going to happen.
In the Middle East, western powers are desperately trying to avert a full-blown war between Israel and Hezbollah…
Israel and the Lebanon-based Hezbollah militant group have been exchanging near-daily fire along the Israel-Lebanon border since Oct. 8. The US and France are attempting to broker a diplomatic solution that would end the fighting. Should those negotiations fail, Israeli officials anticipate a full-blown war with the Iran-backed militia.
Sadly, I am entirely convinced that such a full-blown war could be just months away.
This war in the Middle East is still only in the early stages, and the utter carnage that we will eventually witness will shock the entire world.
We really are living in a time of “wars and rumors of wars”, and famines will intensify as global conflict spreads.
So no, a new golden era of peace and prosperity is not on the way.
Instead, our future will be filled with war, famine and a tremendous amount of pain.
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.
