(The Economic Collapse Blog)—Will we soon see a major prophecy in the Book of Revelation be fulfilled? Global food prices have been skyrocketing and hunger has been spreading like wildfire all over the world. We desperately need 2024 to be a year of good harvests, but unfortunately weather patterns are not cooperating at all and bad news about harvest forecasts just continues to pour in from many of the planet’s most important agricultural regions. Global food supplies just keep getting tighter and tighter, and the agricultural price spikes that we are witnessing right now are definitely quite ominous. Could it be possible that the stage is now being set for the global food crisis prophecy of Revelation 6:6? In that verse, we are warned of a time when food prices will soar to absolutely frightening levels…
Then I heard a voice in the midst of the four living creatures saying, “A quart of wheat for a day’s wages, and three quarts of barley for a day’s wages, and do not harm the oil and the wine.”
We certainly haven’t reached that point yet.
But are we on the way there?
In this article, I would like to share what has been going on with a number of our most important agricultural commodities recently.
For example, poor harvests in Brazil have caused the price of orange juice to approximately double over the past 12 months…
Prices of the breakfast staple have been climbing rapidly in recent years, partly driven by declining output in Florida — the main producer of orange juice in the U.S. — and climate-fueled extreme weather in the main orange producing areas of Brazil.
The South American agricultural powerhouse is the world’s largest producer and exporter of orange juice, which means it plays a hugely influential role in shaping the global industry.
The benchmark frozen concentrated orange juice futures, traded on the Intercontinental Exchange in New York, closed at $4.77 per pound on Wednesday. That’s nearly double the price registered a year ago.
Prices have gone so “bananas” that some orange juice producers are actually “considering turning to alternative fruits”…
Orange juice makers are considering turning to alternative fruits such as mandarins as wholesale prices have “gone bananas” amid fears of poor harvests in Brazil.
Prices of orange juice concentrate reached a new high of $4.95 (£3.88) a lb on futures markets this week after growers in the main orange producing areas of Brazil said they were expecting the harvest to be 24% down on last year at 232m 40.8kg boxes – worse than the 15% fall previously predicted.
The price of coffee is also going haywire.
So if you love coffee, I would stock up now while you still can.
Thanks to extremely dry conditions in Brazil and Vietnam, coffee prices were up “sharply” this week…
Coffee prices Tuesday rallied sharply, with arabica jumping to a 1-month high. Coffee prices soared Tuesday on concern that excessive dryness in Brazil and Vietnam will damage coffee crops and curb global production. Somar Meteorologia reported Monday that Brazil’s Minas Gerais region received 5.3 mm of rain or 69% of the historical average in the past week. Minas Gerais accounts for about 30% of Brazil’s arabica crop.
Last Wednesday, coffee trader Volcafe said Vietnam’s 2024/25 robusta coffee crop may only be 24 million bags, the lowest in 13 years, as poor rainfall in Vietnam has caused “irreversible damage” to coffee blossoms. Volcafe also projects a global robusta deficit of 4.6 million bags in 2024/25, a smaller deficit than the 9-million-bag deficit seen in 2023/24 but the fourth consecutive year of robusta bean deficits.
Wheat is specifically mentioned in Revelation 6:6, and Bloomberg is reporting that a confluence of factors has pushed the price of wheat to the highest level in 10 months…
Wheat briefly touched the highest in 10 months, as cold and dry weather in major producers and the ongoing war in Ukraine deepen supply concerns.
Futures climbed as much as 3.3% in Chicago, before paring some of the gain. Analysts have been cutting production estimates for top exporter Russia in recent weeks, while Ukraine is headed for its driest May on record. Historically low rainfall in Western Australia is also adding to nervousness.
Unfortunately, this is just the beginning.
I am entirely convinced that the price of wheat will soon go far higher than it is right now.
So if you think that the price of bread is high now, just wait until you see what is coming next.
Meanwhile, the price of beef just surged to another brand new all-time record high…
Beef prices skyrocketed to a new record high this Memorial Day weekend as industry experts warn costs could continue to rise even higher if current regulatory and economic conditions remain unchanged.
Recently released data shows that “all fresh beef retail value,” a composite value based on choice beef, other beef, and hamburger retail prices, shot up to $794.90 in April, according to the Economic Research Council, the highest price on record.
The size of the U.S. cattle herd is the smallest that it has been in decades, and one rancher named Shad Sullivan recently warned that beef will soon be a luxury that only the wealthy will be able to afford on a regular basis…
“We are seeing prices at an all-time high, and it is getting close to that point when the consumer is going to say, I can’t do this anymore; it’s just too costly,” said Mr. Sullivan.
“They (officials and regulators) are trying to push these high prices as a new norm where meat is only a treat for the wealthy. That is where they are pushing us, and that is where we are going.”
You may be thinking that if beef gets too expensive you will just eat more chicken and turkey.
Sadly, chicken and turkey prices are poised to go a lot higher thanks to H5N1.
A fresh wave of the bird flu is sweeping across the nation, and Iowa Republican Governor Kim Reynolds just declared a state of emergency in one county in her state due to an outbreak there…
Iowa Republican Governor Kim Reynolds signed a disaster proclamation on Tuesday for one of her state’s counties as public health officials prepare to euthanize more than 4 million chickens exposed to a highly contagious bird flu.
The order comes after a case of avian influenza was confirmed among a large flock of egg-laying chickens in Sioux County on Tuesday by state and local agriculture officials, according to a report from CBS News.
As a result, the animals will be destroyed and their remains will be isolated in an attempt to prevent the further spread of the contagion.
In total, some 4.2 million chickens will be put down.
Just think about that last sentence for a moment.
What do you think that losing 4.2 million chickens will do to egg prices?
Everywhere you look, there are signs of trouble. Unfortunately, this is all happening at a time when foreigners have more control over our food supply than ever before.
Foreigners now control more than 43 million acres of U.S. farmland, and this should deeply alarm all of us…
A recent map has revealed the alarming trend of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) acquiring vast swaths of American farmland, raising serious national security concerns.
Foreign ownership of U.S. agricultural land expanded to approximately 43.4 million acres in 2022, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
According to the USDA, Chinese investors’ ownership of U.S. agricultural land has skyrocketed from merely 13,720 acres in 2010 to an astounding 346,915 acres by 2022 out of the 43 million acres.
Chinese entities hold ownership of farmland across 29 of the 50 U.S. states.
I have been warning for many years that global food supplies would get tighter and tighter.
Now it is happening right in front of our eyes, and hundreds of millions of people are going to bed hungry every single night.
I wish that I could tell you that things will soon get better, but I can’t.
We really are living in the end times, and the things that are written in the Book of Revelation really will take place.
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.
For different reasons, I also think this will be a year of ‘hunger’. Hunger meaning, putting more resources in than getting out. There’s one on YouTube by the name of Rachel Baxter, she got revealed to her that in a certain year hunger would arrive at January 16th. There’s circumstantial evidence that at least in my life this got true on that date. So, therefore I think your message may have some merit. (as said, hunger meaning, putting more effort in than getting out)