Just One Really Bad Year Away from a Horrific World Famine

Just One Really Bad Year Away from a Horrific World Famine

The first four seals in the book of Revelation reveal the death of 1/4 of the earth by war, scarcity, famine, social injustice, plagues, etc. Today, that would be about two billion people.

September 3, 2010

End of the American Dream - The shocking announcement by the Russian government of a 12 month extension of its wheat export ban and the outbreak of food riots in Mozambique are stark reminders that the world is just one really bad year away from a horrific world famine. As you read this, the world is already really, really struggling to feed itself.

Approximately 1 billion people throughout the world go to bed hungry each night. Somewhere in the world someone starves to death every 3.6 seconds, and 75 percent of those are children under the age of five. And those are the statistics that we have seen while North America has been producing record harvests. So what is going to happen when the United States and Canada have really bad harvests for a year or two as world demand for food continues to skyrocket? That is a very sobering question.

Don't think that it can't happen. Russia was the third largest wheat exporter in the world last year, but because of the massive heatwave and the horrific fires that have devastated that nation, they have banned all wheat exports for over a year. That's right. Russia just announced a 12 month extension of its wheat export ban and authorities around the globe are now scrambling to find a way to avoid the terrible food riots that we saw back in 2008. The announcement by the Russian government sent wheat prices to close to a two-year high.

With wheat prices soaring, dozens of nations around the globe already living on the very edge of poverty are wondering how in the world they are going to be able to feed their people.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization has called an emergency meeting to discuss the burgeoning crisis. But if there is simply not enough food then there is not enough food.

Already, food riots in Mozambique this week have left at least seven people dead and at least 280 injured. The riots in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, broke out over the government's decision to raise bread prices a whopping 30 percent. Food warehouses have been looted and police in Maputo actually opened fire on the demonstrators at one point.

But what else can the people there do? When people lose everything they have and they are starving they tend to lose it. It is just human nature.

So will all this rioting change anything? Unfortunately, no. The government of Mozambique says that the bread price increases are "irreversible".

Prices around the world have gone up. The game has changed. Hundreds of millions around the world who can barely afford to feed themselves are going to find it even harder to buy their daily bread.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization says that its global food price index shot up 5% between July and August. That is a huge one month jump.

Of course wheat prices are leading the way. Wheat prices have surged nearly 70 percent since January of this year.

Food prices have even been going up in the United States. We live in a truly global economy now, and the U.S. is not immune from what is going on in the rest of the world. According to recent reports, the price of food is going up significantly at places like Wal-Mart.

And there are signs that things could soon get even worse.

Pakistan just experienced the worst flooding ever recorded in that nation, and needless to say harvests there have been completely obliterated. At one point, one-fifth of the entire nation of Pakistan was under water. The chaos the flooding has caused is unimaginable.

Massive swarms of crop-destroying locusts have invaded over 40 villages in the African nation of Guinea-Bissau and there are reports that the locust swarms are heading north toward Senegal.

In Australia, farmers are bracing for what is being called the worst locust plague in a generation. It is easy to laugh about a "plague of locusts", but for many farmers in Australia it is a nightmare of unprecedented proportions.

Meanwhile, experts tell us that global demand for food will more than double over the next 50 years.

So where in the world is all of that extra food going to come from?

Up to this point, North America has experienced uncharacteristically good weather for 18 consecutive years and has enjoyed many record harvests during that time.

So what happens when the good weather stops someday?

There is no guarantee that we are always going to have a huge abundance of food in this nation.

A major disaster or emergency combined with a bad harvest season could change things in America very, very quickly. Many Americans are realizing that if things go really bad the U.S. government is not going to be able to take care of everyone. Right now, the number of "preppers" in the United States is absolutely exploding. Storing up food and supplies has suddenly become fashionable again.

And rightly so. The truth is that "U.S. strategic grain reserves" are at ridiculously low levels. If a true food crisis hit, those reserves would be gone almost overnight.

Let's hope that the crisis in Russia is resolved soon and that food shortages don't start spreading throughout the world.

But someday if the world does experience a horrific famine, are you and your family prepared?

Population Research Presents a Sobering Prognosis

According to the CIA World Factbook, as of July 2005, there were approximately 6,446,131,400 people on the planet, and the death rate was approximately 8.78 deaths per 1,000 people a year. According to our nifty desktop calculator, that works out to roughly 56,597,034 people leaving us every year. Still, more people are being born than dying. The population growth rate is hovering around 1.14%, which doesn't seem like much, but last year that was (back to the calculator!) 73,485,898 more mouths to feed. - How many people die each year worldwide?, Yahoo! Answers - November 28, 2005

July 29, 2010

New York Times - With 267 people being born every minute and 108 dying, the world’s population will top seven billion next year, a research group projects, while the ratio of working-age adults to support the elderly in developed countries declines precipitously because of lower birthrates and longer life spans.

In a sobering assessment of those two trends, William P. Butz, president of the Population Reference Bureau, said that “chronically low birthrates in developed countries are beginning to challenge the health and financial security of the elderly” at the same time that “developing countries are adding over 80 million to the population each year and the poorest of those countries are adding 20 million, exacerbating poverty and threatening the environment.”

Projections, especially over decades, are vulnerable to changes in immigration, retirement ages, birthrates, health care and other variables, but in releasing the bureau’s 2010 population data sheet, Carl Haub, its senior demographer, estimated this week that by 2050 the planet will be home to more than nine billion people.

Even with a decline in birthrates in less developed countries from 6 children per woman in 1950 to 2.5 today (and to 2 children or less in Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Iran, Thailand and Turkey), the population of Africa is projected to at least double by midcentury to 2.1 billion. Asia will add an additional 1.3 billion.

While the United States, Australia, Canada and New Zealand will continue to grow because of higher birthrates and immigration, Europe, Japan and South Korea will shrink (although the recession reduced birthrates in the United States and Spain and slowed rising birthrates in Russia and Norway).

In Japan, the population of working-age people, typically defined as those 15 to 64, compared with the population 65 and older that is dependent on this younger group, is projected to decline to a ratio of one to one, from the current three to one. Worldwide, the ratio of working age people for every person in the older age group is expected to decline to four to one, from nine to one now.

Earlier this week, Eurostat, the statistical arm of the 27-nation European Union, reported that while the union’s population topped a half billion this year, 900,000 of the 1.4 million growth from the year before resulted from immigration. Eurostat has predicted that deaths will outpace births in five years, a trend that has already occurred in Bulgaria, Latvia and Hungary.

While the bulge in younger people, if they are educated, presents a potential “demographic dividend” for countries like Bangladesh and Brazil, the shrinking proportion of working-age people elsewhere may place a strain on governments and lead them to raise retirement ages and to encourage alternative job opportunities for older workers.

Even in the United States, the proportion of the gross domestic product spent on Social Security and Medicare is projected to rise to 14.5 percent in 2050, from 8.4 percent this year.

The Population Reference Bureau said that by 2050, Russia and Japan would be bumped from the 10 most populous countries by Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.