More food shortages and price hikes are coming before the end of 2023, as President Joe Biden’s economic agenda, dubbed “Bidenomics,” once again puts too much pressure on inflation and food production.
(Article cross-posted from Natural News)
“The economy is in the dump, and no matter how many times the media or President Joe Biden tells us how great we are doing, Americans are going to judge that for themselves by what they see in their wallets, their bank accounts and what the bill is every time they shop for food, appliances, cars, homes or anything else they may need to purchase,” wrote Susan Duclos for All News Pipeline. (Related: Massive government spending is keeping inflation high, warns market expert.)
“Many Americans have been waiting for prices to lower, but even if inflation came to zero – which isn’t even their goal, two percent is – prices will not come down. They just wouldn’t rise for that month,” wrote Duclos. “The only way to lower prices is to see negative inflation, which simply isn’t going to happen.”
The current rate of inflation has slowed down to 4.9 percent in July year-over-year – still more than double the Federal Reserve’s target of two percent – the slowest it has been since last fall. This is also down from the 5.7 percent annual inflation recorded in June.
Of the different food products that saw price increases, frozen vegetables posted the largest increase, costing 17.1 percent more than it did last year. This is followed by margarine, with prices up by 11.3 percent annually.
Other notable food products that saw price increases include cereals and bakery products, which are now seven percent more expensive, and dairy, which is 1.3 percent more expensive.
The ongoing price increases represent a bigger strain on American household budgets, as Americans now consume 13.4 cents on food for each $1 in consumer spending – the second-largest expense for Americans, second only to housing at 34.7 cents per dollar.
“To be sure, the high inflation of the past two-plus years has done lots of economic damage,” noted Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics. “Due to high inflation, the typical household spent $202 more in July than they did a year ago to buy the same goods and services. And they spent $709 more than they did two years ago.”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that by the end of the year, food prices will be an average of 5.8 percent higher than in 2022. Next year, food prices will continue rising by an estimated 2.4 percent.
Food shortages in popular food products to continue
To make matters worse for Americans, many food products are expected to experience shortages in the remaining months of the year.
Megan Hageman of Eat This, Not That! warned that five popular food products expected to have troubles with supply are rice, pasta, chocolate, salmon and flour.
The world’s supply of rice has been ravaged since the Western world blocked Russian rice exports since the beginning of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine. Damaging weather in major rice-producing countries like China and Pakistan has also dented global supply.
While pasta is not a core cuisine for most Americans, the global decrease in pasta supply has still affected U.S. households, with the average price of a pound of spaghetti and macaroni rising to $1.47 compared to an average cost of $1.21 per pound last year. In Italy, the pasta shortage got so bad that the country’s government met for crisis talks earlier this year solely to address the issue.
Cocoa – the main ingredient of chocolate – has become a hot commodity in recent months, and current prices are the highest they have been in nearly 12 years. Cocoa is heavily dependent on fertilizer, and because of the drop in global fertilizer supply due to the sanctions on Russian fertilizer exports, global supply has dropped drastically.
The drought in many parts of the U.S. has brought salmon populations into a steep decline this year. To protect the remaining population, California has banned commercial and recreational salmon fishing for the entirety of the 2023 fishing season.
The flour shortage has been ongoing since last year, causing prices to rise by 8.5 percent compared to last year. Analysts warn that Americans will likely continue to feel the effects of this shortage into 2024. Dry conditions in the South and Central U.S. have caused crops of hard red winter and hard red spring wheat to decline, leading to shortages.
Learn more about the true state of the American economy at EconomicRiot.com. Watch economist Steve Moore explain why Americans will still feel the dire effects of inflation in the coming months.
This video is from the News Clips channel on Brighteon.com.
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- Fast-food chains under Yum! Brands to go CASHLESS soon: Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC to REJECT cash.
- INFLATION WOES: Millennials crumble, turn to social media to air frustration over soaring cost of living.
- Compilation: Millennials CRUSHED by inflation freak out over soaring cost of living.
- More Americans continue to rely on Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) services to combat inflation and consumer debt.
- Wealthy shoppers now embracing discount stores amid worsening FOOD INFLATION.
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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.
