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.
As I explain in my new book, The Coming Food Crisis: How Corporations, Activists, and Climate Alarmists Are Waging War on Farmers, the United States is not immune to these pressures. Indeed, the U.S. has already embraced the GMO-dependent industrial agriculture system being thrust upon rebellious E.U. farmers in France, Ireland, and the Netherlands. The Klaus/Gates charlatans at the WEF and U.N. are simply ramping up the tiresome propaganda that vegan diets are healthier for humans and animals and that “the only way to save the world from climate change is to mandate GMO methods.” If ever Greta Thunberg had a worthy cause (she hasn’t thus far), defending farmers and food cultures would be worth a sailing trip back from Gaza.
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.
Iran is just one of numerous needles that could prick this magic food balloon. The greatest peril is old-fashioned inflation. This is what drove U.S. food prices up by about 20% in a two-year blip under the Biden administration’s “inflation reduction” policies (that is, Biden’s renewables manufacturing spending spree). Monetizing debt to fuel overspending sows the seeds of inflation: Econ 101. This inflationary pressure does not need an Iranian oil crisis to fuel it, but such events can certainly add fuel to the price-spiking flames.
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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.
Inflation ravaged food prices in Venezuela, driven not by communist failures, but by capitalism: low oil prices and rising imports, aggravated by punishing exchange rates, sent costs soaring. Venezuelan inflation at one point exceeded 100,000 percent. Fiat currency collectors can purchase a $100-trillion Zimbabwe note for $138.00. With BRICS in full swing and the federal debt approaching $39 trillion, could hyperinflation (defined as inflation exceeding 50% per month) ever rear its devastating head on American shores?
Of course it could, and likely will. (Who ever imagined that a pick-up truck would retail for $80,000?) Like the Great Depression, the 1970s OPEC crisis, and the mortgage derivatives fiasco of 2007–2008, America is not immune to the laws of mathematics, economics, and money supply.
As a farmer and former tax attorney, I understand food supplies, supply chains, and inflation threats and how they converge to form a perfect storm of risk hovering over America as we bicker and dither over transgenderism, open borders, Iran, and the SAVE America Act. It is almost as if a “watch the birdie” globalist photographer incessantly distracts American consumers away from the death of their farms and food distribution system, like children, or, perhaps more apropos, like livestock being funneled into a dystopian CAFO.
I invite Americans to research the threats I have outlined here more thoroughly by reading my new book.
