by Mark Sircus

14 March 2011

from IMVA Website
 

I asked Gerald Celente how bad things are going to get because he has a feeling for that more than most. In the interview it’s a man from Brooklyn talking to the street wise guy from the Bronx.

 

The interview leads off an essay that addresses the converging simultaneous events of,

 

 

 

In Japan today the news is dire on every front.

 

It is important to note that only 15% of Japan’s land is suitable for cultivation, meaning they have to import about 50% of their requirements for grain and fodder crops and rely on imports for most of their supply of meat.

 

Japan is the world’s 2nd largest fishing nation having over 2,000 fishing ports and one of the most advanced aquaculture (sea farming) industries on the planet.

"For Japan, a nation that lives by the sea, food comes in by the sea, energy comes in by the sea and exports go out by the sea. Everything stops if a quarter of the coastline has been wiped out," said Weinberg who teaches at New York University.

The main destruction that has been wrought upon Japan was centered on that 15% of their cultivatable land and has destroyed a great part of their ability to feed themselves along with annihilating their fishing fleet and ports.

Until now, in the first world at least we’ve pretty much taken food for granted but that’s about to change as the seriousness of the food crisis bites down harder each month.

“Fears grow over global food supply”

“Riots spread as global food shortage worsens”

“We are sleepwalking into a crisis,”

..are just some of the headlines and statements we are hearing these days.

 

This is a crisis that is going to slice through humanity though interestingly enough it is coming ashore with other simultaneous crises that are bringing an abrupt change to modern day life. In Japan it is unimaginable how life has changed adding one more pressure on the world’s food supply as well as its financial system.

The United Nations in March expressed alarm at a huge decline in bee colonies under a multiple onslaught of pests and pollution, urging an international effort to save the pollinators that are vital for food crops. Much of the decline, ranging up to 85 percent in some areas, is taking place in the industrialized northern hemisphere due to more than a dozen factors, according to a report by the UN’s environmental agency.

 

They include pesticides, air pollution, a lethal pinhead-sized parasite that only affects bee species in the northern hemisphere, mismanagement of the countryside, the loss of flowering plants and a decline in beekeepers in Europe. The bees are going, bats too.

 

Fish are dying off in staggering numbers and the birds are dropping from the sky. Are we next?

The New York Times reports,

“These forecasts of apocalypse have touched a nerve. Americans, still reeling from the devastating impact of the mortgage debacle, are fearful that the next economic disaster is only a matter of time.

 

To anyone reading the headlines of budget deficits and staggering pension liabilities, it takes little imagination to conclude that the next big one will be government itself.”

In this report the Times is writing specifically about a collapse in local government and the services they provide.

The consequences of western financial indulgences will have a devastating impact. The adjustment that we are just beginning to undergo will be of such colossal magnitude that life will be very different for coming generations compared to our current financial and moral decadence. But this dire prophecy is not going to play out through a long period of time but will crash down heavily on everyone during the next two years.

The trend is down with us coming closer and closer to the edge of a frightening fall that could come as early as next week or next year, it’s hard to tell as Gerald Celente shares in the above interview. In agriculture the world is consuming grains faster than farmers are growing them, draining reserves and pushing prices up to record levels.

 

Russia’s ban on grain exports means the country’s farmers will plant the fewest wheat fields in four years, another sign that global prices will keep rising.

 

Wheat plantings in Russia, once the second-biggest exporter, will drop 2.3 percent to 64.2 million acres for this year’s crop.
 


London Store Shelves - November 2010
 

Supermarkets typically only have an average of 72
hours of inventory so even a temporary shortage of
food supplies could be catastrophic for the unprepared.
 

In a true emergency most of us will have to fend for ourselves. In a true emergency forget about finding what you need at the store.

 

You know what it’s like when there’s even a moderate snowstorm in the forecast - no bottled water, no toilet paper, no bread to be found anywhere. The shelves are stripped bare in hours. The Japanese have reported several supermarkets running out of food in Tokyo as locals rushed to get essential items.

 

Most people simply don’t realize how fragile the food distribution system is in this or any country and how vulnerable we are to the climate as well as insane monetary policy.
 

China is gobbling up nearly a quarter of the
U.S. soybean crop in order to fatten hogs
and chickens craved by its middle class.
 

There are seven billion mouths to feed on earth with more arriving every day.

 

Growing demand, falling production, a market based upon speculation, using food to produce fuel, dramatic climate conditions and the huge reduction of the number of farmers in the first world are all leading to crisis in and the result is seen in food prices increasing for eighth consecutive months.

 

Global food prices reached new highs in February, a U.N. food agency said last week, warning that oil price spikes could provoke further increases.
 

The Ogallala Aquifer, the world’s largest underground
body of fresh water, has irrigated thousands of square
miles of American farmland. Now it is running dry. In a
brief half-century we have drawn the Ogallala level down
from an average of 240 feet to about 80 feet.
 

Tyler Durden writes,

“There are several significant factors contributing to rising food prices, such as extreme weather conditions, biofuel production and Wall Street speculation; but the Federal Reserve’s policies deliberately threw gasoline all over those brush fires.”

Kevin Hall reports,

“The truth of the matter is that when the Federal Reserve moved on the quantitative easing, it did export inflation to a lot of these emerging markets…

 

There’s no doubt that one of the side effects of the weak dollar and quantitative easing has been rising commodity prices. As food prices increase, food stamps are obviously going to buy you less food.

 

On top of that, as food prices escalate, millions more will need food assistance, right at the point when the current safety net can least afford it.”

In a recent segment, Feeding the Fires of Revolution, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria says a spike in food prices, ignited, for example, by protests in North Africa, isn’t limited to third-world countries and,

“may prove to be the biggest influencer of global events in 2011.”

 

 

 

 

Higher prices mean more hunger worldwide.

 

It is predictable that higher prices and eventual hyperinflation will lead to famine, misery and social unrest. The rising prices and the conflicts in North Africa and the Middle East were predictable outcomes of US Quantitative Easing.
 



 

 

National Uprisings

Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey, writing for Pravda.Ru says that under the world’s present financial and economic system,

“It is not a question of not producing enough food to eat - it is far worse; we have created mechanisms which exclude countless and growing millions from the right to eat, to work and to live. This system does not work.”

And people are getting mad and madder and eventually it will be civil disobedience all over the world as citizens just get sick of their governments and what is being done to them by their arrogant leaders.

Tyler Durden writes in detail about this system and the revolution that is starting to rise up against it.

 

He says,

“We are witnessing a decentralized global rebellion against Neo-Liberal economic imperialism. While each national uprising has its own internal characteristics, each one, at its core, is about the rising costs of living and lack of financial opportunity and security.

 

Throughout the world the situation is the same: increasing levels of unemployment and poverty as price inflation on food and basic necessities is soaring.”

Whether national populations realize it or not, these uprisings are against systemic global economic policies that are strategically designed to exploit the working class, reduce living standards, increase personal debt and create severe inequalities of wealth.

 

These global uprisings, which have only just begun, are the first wave of the inevitable reaction to the implementation of a centralized worldwide Neo-Feudal economic order. I am afraid we have yet to see how brutal western governments are going to get and to what lengths they will go to preserve the status quo.

There are hundreds of millions of people who will not know what hit them and the government and the press are certainly not warning anyone to prepare for anything. A huge segment of earth’s population who has been accustomed to the good life will be left with a whole lot of nothing when the next financial collapse occurs.

 

In the end it looks like it’s going to be: no services, no benefits, no jobs, no homes and lots of hungry people with empty stomachs. The world system based on debt and thin air is about to do a disappearing act but before it does it is going to go through an agonizing death dance.

One of the hidden drivers of increasing food prices is the increasing competition for food around the world as governments and individuals horde and stockpile. It is bad enough when governments buy large tonnages with real money, but consider what the United States government is doing to feed 40 million of its citizens with food stamps.

 

They do not have the money for that program or any other program, being a bankrupt nation, so they are borrowing the billions each month and their Federal Reserve is simply monetizing that debt.

 

Imagine if everyone could borrow unlimited funds to buy food what kind of situation we would end up with.

Even though the government is not warning its citizens about any imminent dangers, it is preparing for disaster. One of the nation’s largest suppliers of dehydrated food has cut loose 99% of their dealers and distributors because the United States federal government is ordering huge amounts of freeze-dried foods, 420 million meals, to be exact, or one billion dollars’ worth.

 

Now all we have to do is wait until China gets into the act and puts some of their small change down on world food exchanges.