Food Chain Catastrophe: Emergency Shut Down Of West Coast Fisheries

Mac Slavo

Earlier this week Michael Snyder warned that the bottom of our food chain is going through a catastrophic collapse with sea creatures dying in absolutely massive numbers. The cause of the problem is a mystery to scientists who claim that they can’t pinpoint how or why it’s happening.

What’s worse, the collapse of sea life in the Pacific Ocean isn’t something that will affect us several decades into the future. The implications are being seen right now, as evidenced by an emergency closure of fisheries along the West coast this week.

Stockpiling of Food Banned in Venezuela, Fingerprint Scanners Appear in Stores

Chris Carrington

News reports indicate that Venezuela is starting to install fingerprint scanners in supermarkets as a way of preventing ‘food hoarding’. Venezuela is experiencing widespread shortages of most foodstuffs including the most basic such as bread, flour and grains as well as an acute shortage of medicines.

Unable to buy imported food due to a plummeting currency and falling oil prices resulting in a lack of revenue, Venezuelans are becoming increasingly desperate.

President Maduro has accused Colombian food smugglers of buying up massive amounts of staples to sell back to people at vastly marked up prices.

The scanners that are being installed in stores are to prevent people buying more than their allotted quota as the implementation of rationing begins.

California Drought Spreading

Chris Carrington

The US Drought Monitor is reporting that 58% of California is now affected by a crippling drought, and that it is spreading at an unprecedented rate.

The agency has five levels of alert with ‘exceptional drought,’ the current level in California, listed as the most serious.

The LA Times reports:

Worldwide Water Shortage by 2040?

New study concludes that water shortages may be a bigger problem than we thought.

Kevin Samson  

Fresh water supplies are under assault on multiple fronts. We are seeing the continuing fallout from the droughts in the Western U.S. and Brazil - both are incredibly important areas to the global food supply.

At the same time, corporate hoarding of fresh water is on the rise. Nestle's former CEO clearly stated that water supplies should be privatized and that the right to fresh, clean water is not an essential human right.

Knowing that both the climate and corporate influence are converging to restrict and/or dramatically increase the cost of fresh water, two new reports reinforce that there isn't much time left to find solutions. In fact, for an increasing number of people, water might not be available at any cost.  

The Next Food Crisis Will Be Caused By Globalist Land-Grabs and Privatization

Susanne Posel, Contributor

The UN warns that global food stores like grains are depleting at an exponential rate; and when combined with failing harvests, there will be a food crisis in 2013.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) explains that “we’ve not been producing as much as we are consuming. That is why stocks are being run down. Supplies are now very tight across the world and reserves are at a very low level, leaving no room for unexpected events next year.” 

Since 2010, the FAO has stated that the rise in food prices is directly correlated to the 80 million people being added to the world’s population annually. This fact, according to the globalists at the UN, is beginning to “tax both the skills of farmers and the limits of the earth’s land and water resources.” Added to this problem are the 3 million people who are “moving up the food chain” eating more than their share in gluttonous nations like the United States and China. 

Global Food Reserves Have Reached Their Lowest Level In Almost 40 Years

Michael Snyder, Contributor

For six of the last eleven years the world has consumed more food than it has produced.  This year, drought in the United States and elsewhere has put even more pressure on global food supplies than usual.

As a result, global food reserves have reached their lowest level in almost 40 years.

Experts are warning that if next summer is similar to this summer that it could be enough to trigger a major global food crisis.  At this point, the world is literally living from one year to the next.  There is simply not much of a buffer left.

In the Western world, the first place where we are going to notice the impact of this crisis is in the price of food.  It is being projected that overall food prices will rise between 5 and 20 percent by the end of this year.  It is becoming increasingly clear that the world has reached a tipping point.  We aren't producing enough food for everyone anymore, and food reserves will continue to get lower and lower.  Eventually they will be totally gone.

Food Inflation, Food Shortages And Food Riots Are Coming

Dees Illustration

Michael Snyder, Contributor

A devastating global food crisis unlike anything we have ever seen in modern times is coming. Crippling drought and bizarre weather patterns have damaged food production all over the world this summer, and the UN and the World Bank have both issued ominous warnings about the food inflation that is coming.

To those of us in the Western world, a rise in the price of food can be a major inconvenience, but in the developing world it can mean the difference between life and death. Just remember what happened back in 2008. When food prices hit record highs it led to food riots in 28 different countries. Today, there are approximately 2 billion people that are malnourished around the globe. Even rumors of food shortages are enough to spark mass chaos in many areas of the planet. When people fear that they are not going to be able to feed their families they tend to get very desperate. That is why a recent CNN article declared that "2013 will be a year of serious global crisis". 

The truth is that we are not just facing rumors of a global food crisis - one is actually starting to unfold right in front of our eyes. The United States experienced the worst drought in more than 50 years this summer, and some experts are already declaring that the weather has been so dry for so long that tremendous damage has already been done to next year's crops. On the other side of the world, Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan have all seen their wheat crops devastated by the horrible drought this summer. Australia has also been dealing with drought, and in India monsoon rains were about 15 percent behind pace in mid-August. Global food production is going to be much less than expected this year, and global food demand continues to steadily rise. What that means is that food inflation, food shortages and food riots are coming, and it isn't going to be pretty.

Food Prices to Skyrocket in Coming Food Crisis

Activist Post

You don't have to be survivalist or a doomsdayer to recognize the practicality in having some food stored away for a rainy day. In fact, it's simply becoming common sense to have a certain amount of bulk food storage in your house.

But these days, with record droughts ravaging the bread basket of America coupled with runaway money printing by the Fed, food inflation is creating a dangerous scenario but also a fantastic investment opportunity for average folks.

During times of economic uncertainty it can be especially difficult to determine a safe place to protect your savings. Countless financial advisers offer advice on asset protection and other ways to keep your nest egg performing slightly above inflation. However, many of these strategies involve paper investments that come with risks.

How Bulk Food Storage Can Make You an 80% Return in the Coming Food Crisis

Activist Post

You don't have to be survivalist or a doomsdayer to recognize the practicality in having some food stored away for a rainy day. In fact, it's simply becoming common sense to have a certain amount of bulk food storage in your house.

But these days, with record droughts ravaging the bread basket of America coupled with runaway money printing by the Fed, food inflation is creating a fantastic investment opportunity for average folks.

During times of economic uncertainty it can be especially difficult to determine a safe place to protect your savings. Countless financial advisers offer advice on asset protection and other ways to keep your nest egg performing slightly above inflation. However, many of these strategies involve paper investments that come with risks.

Farmers abandon fields larger than Belgium and Luxembourg, food prices set to surge due to drought

Madison Ruppert, Contributor
Activist Post

The worst drought in the United States in a half a century has led to the destruction of roughly one-sixth of the expected corn crop in America over the past month and will likely lead to a significant rise in the price of corn in the very near future.

To make matters even worse, much of the corn crop in the United States is genetically modified and thus susceptible to so-called “superbugs” and is the same strain which has been banned in multiple countries in the European Union.

This July has been the hottest in American history and has caused major damage to the corn crops throughout the United States making some farmers actually entirely abandon fields greater in size than the nations of Belgium and Luxembourg.

Obviously such a major reduction in the corn supply will certainly lead to a rise in the price of corn; it is simple economics. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like such a surge would diminish any time soon.

Even more unfortunate is the fact that corn is not the only commodity which will be negatively impacted by this drought and heat wave.

Radiation in Our Food

Dees Illustration

Chris Kilham
Fox News

Though the horrendous tsunami that hit Japan on March 12, 2011 seems like old news in the midst of today’s headlines, the crippled nuclear power plants at Fukishima Daichi continue to spew radiation into water, air and soil, with no end in sight.

Even as thousands of Japanese workers struggle to contain the ongoing nuclear disaster, low levels of radiation from those power plants have been detected in foods in the United States. Milk, fruits and vegetables show trace amounts of radioactive isotopes from the Fukushima Daichi power plants, and the media appears to be paying scant attention, if any attention at all. It is as if the problem only involves Japan, not the vast Pacific Ocean, into which highly radioactive water has poured by the dozens of tons, and not into air currents and rainwater that carry radiation to U.S. soil and to the rest of the world. And while both Switzerland and Germany have come out against any further nuclear development, the U.S. the nuclear power industry continues as usual, with aging and crumbling power plants receiving extended operating licenses from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as though it can’t happen here. But it is happening here, on your dinner plate.

Taking a page from the BP pubic relations handbook, TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) and the Japanese government have downplayed the extent of the nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daichi, in which three of six nuclear reactors are in ongoing meltdown. According to Japanese nuclear engineer Naoto Sekimura, nuclear fuel rod meltdown at the damaged plants began only hours after the tsunami, and the situation has not been contained. There is still an ongoing threat of a total “China Syndrome” meltdown, and Japanese officials now say that the three damaged plants may possibly continue to emit uncontrolled radiation for another year.

Read Full Article

Enter your email address to subscribe to our newsletter:


Delivered by FeedBurner

Getting Used to Life Without Food, Part 1

Wall Street, BP, Bio-Ethanol and the Death of Millions

Grain Storage Wikimedia Image

William Engdahl
Financial Sense

My late grandfather, a man of sturdy Norwegian-American farm stock, who later became a newspaper editor and political activist during the First World War, used to say, 'A man can get used to pretty much anything with time, except dying...and even that with some practice.' Well, as fate has it, it seems we, the vast majority of the human race, are about to test that adage in regard to the availability of our daily bread itself.

Food is one of those funny things it's hard to live without. We all tend to take it for granted that our local supermarket will continue to offer whatever we wish, in abundance, at affordable prices or nearly so. Yet living without adequate food is the growing prospect facing hundreds of millions, if not billions, of us over the coming years.

GMO created foods may be used as a biological weapon

Kenneth Schortgen Jr
Examiner

Genetically modified organisms (GMO) which are used to create new food seeds and crops, are being tied to use as a potential biological weapon in creating infertility in places around the world.

A report published on May 28th tied together that the international organization Codex, which is seeking to regulate every food, mineral, and herb in the world used for consumption, does not consider GMO created products as food, and thus they are being placed in a separate sphere of attributes that can be used for alternative functions.

Including birth control and creating infertility in a nation or population.

There has been a concerted national effort by citizens to have the US government label GMOs.  Opposing it are government intent not only to keep them unlabeled in the US but efforts at the international level by the US government to remove all labeling of GMOs through Codex.  The problem is that Codex applies to food, and GMOs don't qualify. 

The corn has been field tested in tests financed by the US Department of Agriculture along with a small California bio-tech company named Epicyte. Announcing his success at a 2001 press conference, the president of Epicyte, Mitch Hein, pointing to his GMO corn plants, announced, “We have a hothouse filled with corn plants that make anti-sperm antibodies.” 

Hein claimed it was a possible solution to world “over-population. – Salem News

Read Full Article

Enter your email address to subscribe to our newsletter:


Delivered by FeedBurner

Food prices set to double by 2030, aid group says

"Now we have entered an age of growing crisis, of shock piled upon shock: vertiginous food price spikes and oil price hikes, devastating weather events, financial meltdowns and global contagion,"Oxfam said in a report.

MSNBC/Reuters

LONDON — Food prices could double in the next 20 years and demand in 2050 will be 70 percent higher than now, U.K. charity Oxfam said on Tuesday, warning of worsening hunger as the global food economy stumbles close to breakdown.

"The food system is pretty well bust in the world," Oxfam Chief Executive Barbara Stocking told reporters, announcing the launch of the Grow campaign as 925 million people go hungry every day.

"All the signs are that the number of people going hungry is going up," Stocking said.

Hunger was increasing due to rising food price inflation and oil price hikes, scrambles for land and water, and creeping climate change.

Read Full Article

Enter your email address to subscribe to our newsletter:


Delivered by FeedBurner

Mercury, PCBs widespread in sport fish along California's urban coastline, survey finds

Nineteen percent of the coastline sampled by the state water board harbored fish with mercury in such high concentrations that they shouldn't be eaten by young women and children.

Source

Tony Barboza
Los Angeles Times

Traces of mercury and PCBs are widespread in sport fish in California's urban coastal waters, a survey released last week by the state water board found.

But 19% of the urban coastline sampled by researchers harbored fish with mercury in such high concentrations that they shouldn't be eaten by young women and children. Fourteen percent of locations had similarly elevated levels of PCBs.

The findings, part of a two-year inquiry that is the largest statewide survey of contaminants in sport fish along the California coast, examined more than 2,000 fish from three dozen species gathered in 2009 from waters near Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego.

Researchers said the study highlights the health problem of lingering mercury, a poisonous metal that is found in fish globally, and of PCBs, toxic chemicals the United States banned in the 1970s. Both substances continue to pose a risk to people who eat fish caught along the California coast because they can lead to nervous system damage and developmental problems in children and can cause cancer, liver damage and reproductive harm.

Read Full Article

Enter your email address to subscribe to our newsletter:


Delivered by FeedBurner

Family Farmers Worse Off Despite High Prices (Video)

The Real News

Enter your email address to subscribe to our newsletter:


Delivered by FeedBurner

Hedge Farm! The Doomsday Food Price Scenario Turning Hedgies into Survivalists

Wikimedia Commons image

Foster Kamer
New York Observer

On the rare occasion that New Yorkers talk about farming, it's usually something along the lines of what sort of organic kale to plant in the vanity garden at the second house in the Adirondacks. But on a recent afternoon,The Observer had a conversation of a different sort about agricultural pursuits with a hedge fund manager he'd met at one of the many dark-paneled private clubs in midtown a few weeks prior. "A friend of mine is actually the largest owner of agricultural land in Uruguay," said the hedge fund manager. "He's a year older than I am. We're somewhere [around] the 15th-largest farmers in America right now."

"We," as in, his hedge fund.

It may seem a little odd that in 2011 anyone's thinking of putting money into assets that would have seemed attractive in 1911, but there's something in the air-namely, fear. The hedge fund manager and others like him envision a doomsday scenario catalyzed by a weak dollar, higher-than-you-think inflation and an uncertain political climate here and abroad.

The pattern began to emerge sometime in 2008. "The Hedge Fund Manager Who Bought a Farm," read the headline on one February 2008 Times of London piece detailing a British hedge fund manager's attempt to play off the rising prices of grains in order to usurp local farmland. A Financial Times piece two months later began: "Hedge funds and investment banks are swapping their Gucci for gumboots." It detailed BlackRock's then-relatively new $420 million Agriculture Fund, which had already swept up 2,800 acres of land.

Read Full Article

RELATED ARTICLE:
5 Easy Ways to Prepare for Food Inflation

Enter your email address to subscribe to our newsletter:


Delivered by FeedBurner

Alarming Number of Disasters Striking World "Food Baskets"

Holly Deyo

Millennium Ark

For the last 5 years, we have posted countless articles covering both natural disasters and their impact on our food supplies as well as on many other timely topics. After several decades of monitoring these events, it's hard to convey how shocked we are by the sheer number of disasters that have occurred just in the first 4 months of 2011.

Yesterday, all day, I spent analyzing natural disasters and plotted them against our food belts. Never, ever, have I seen so many federally declared disasters this early in the year.

The DHS/FEMA maps were defined by 2 colors: blue signified no disasters (to distinguish the disaster-free areas from water, they are shown in white below) and yellow indicated declared disasters. Map after map, state after state were mostly yellow. Surely this must be an error?Thinking through the numerous news items on Earth Changes, with sinking feeling, I knew they were correct. It was only when the state information was transferred to a single national map, the implications become uncomfortably clear.