Doc7505
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- Feb 16, 2016
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Is there a coming US food crisis?
Most Americans can’t imagine their favorite restaurant just being out of certain foods. But the threat is closer than we think.
Is there a coming US food crisis?
Most Americans can’t imagine their favorite restaurant just being out of certain foods. But the threat is closer than we think.
It is difficult to imagine that the mighty United States could face threats to its seemingly abundant supply of grocery store and restaurant offerings. America has led the world in creating the modern industrial food system (known as “the Green Revolution”) and remains the world’s top food-exporting nation. Yet economic and logistical fractures have become visible, threatening to burst this illusion of plenty in a matter of moments.
America’s farms have been quietly disappearing for decades, and productive farmland acreage has dropped in tandem. The U.S. now imports more food than it exports, much of that from China. The pandemic revealed the vulnerability of strained supply lines as grocery shelves emptied of more than mere toilet paper. Americans clamor for cheap hamburger, but the U.S. cattle herd is the smallest it’s been in 75 years. These are all harbingers of future food supply challenges.
The farmer revolts in the E.U. are distant from America’s shores, but they reflect ongoing ideological pressures by globalists determined to dominate the world’s food production system. The odd bedfellows of animal rights activists and climate alarmists who attack farmers in Europe gather annually at Davos to declaim human eating habits. Both groups seek to “liberate” animals from the food supply: one to save the animals (and leave them unalived, because they will disappear); the other to save the world...from alleged climate change and the ubiquitous carbon culprit.
~Snip~
Whether this drive to consolidate farming into the industrial model is motivated by a desire to control humanity (linking food purchases to an electronic currency and social credit would be a doozy) or simply the age-old push to increase market share, the result is the same: increasing dependency on ever fewer farms and food manufacturers for foods that are shipped ever-greater distances. More than half of all U.S. produce is grown in California; more than half of all lamb eaten here is shipped from Australia and New Zealand. This distribution system isn’t very good for the environment; it’s even worse for U.S. food security.
Americans spent about 9% of their average household budgets on food for more than five decades, enabled by technological advances, chemicals that boosted yields, and cheap fuels. Yet all three of these advances conceal hidden dangers, especially dependence on cheap energy. The Iran conflict threatens to spike oil and natural gas prices. Diesel is used in tractors. Urea, a key synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, is made from natural gas. Cheap food is the direct product of cheap energy.
What non-farmer drive-thru diners don’t discern is how quickly inflation impacts energy-layered food production inputs. Tractors need diesel as they till, plant, spray, and harvest; pesticides, seeds, equipment, and fertilizers are manufactured and delivered using fuel; crops and processed food products are shipped through vast distribution networks of shipping containers and tractor-trailer trucks. Food supplies are thus particularly vulnerable to compounded inflationary impacts.
Commentary:
Democrats and their Social Marxist friends are trying to create food shortages. The Biden administration created suplly side shortages, killing cows and chickens (using flu as an excuse) which drove up prices.
Mr Klar has compiled snippets of current and past history to try and prove to us there’s trouble! Right here in river city! I’m seeing way too many of those articles here lately. Farms, family or otherwise, have been selling out to their neighbors for over a century. Much of this is generational. The industrial revolution created vast numbers of jobs off the farms. Many farm children took advantage of that. Growing farms have more to do with technology and horsepower. One man is capable of managing far more acres than or grandfathers could.
If you wish to look at our current problems, I’ll point you towards a couple of government regs. First is the ethanol mandate. Over 40% of our corn is used in our fuel tanks. When these mandates went into effect vast amounts of grassland and CRP ground was turned under and put towards growing $8 corn. Now we have a hay shortage. The other has been our decade’s of low interest rates. This easy money policy has driven land prices into areas most farmers are unwilling to go. Rather than play their game many retire and sell/rent. What is left standing tends to be what everyone wants to call industrial farms. I know of a farmer who operates around 10,000 acres. Is it industrial or family? It’s operated by a father and son. They need to spread their ever growing inputs over more acres.
