Category: Investing

About 90% of what I read online is complete junk. I take breaks reading the junk here and there. But I can’t help myself sometimes. There is a website called “The Economic Collapse Blog”. I visit it once in a while for comic relief. The latest article talks about food shortages in 2023. He starts off the article as most would. Promoting fear.

Things are far worse than you are being told. Over the past few months, I have been carefully documenting facts that show that global food production is going to be way down in 2022. Unfortunately, most people out there don’t seem to understand that the food that isn’t being grown in 2022 won’t be on our store shelves in 2023. We are potentially facing an absolutely unprecedented worldwide food crisis next year, but the vast majority of the population doesn’t seem very alarmed about this. So I would encourage you to help me get this warning out by sharing this list with as many people as you possibly can. As you will see below, we now have so many data points that it is impossible to deny what is coming. The following is a list of 33 things we know about the coming food shortages…

Let’s take a look at the first nine facts:

#1 The hard red winter wheat crop in the United States this year “was the smallest since 1963”.  But in 1963, there were only 182 million people living in this nation.  Today, our population has grown to 329 million.
#2 It is being projected that the rice harvest in California will be “half what it would be in a normal year”.
#3 The U.S. tomato harvest will come in at just 10.5 million tons in 2022.  That is over a million tons lower than a normal year.
#4 This will be the worst U.S. corn harvest in at least a decade.
#5 Year-to-date shipments of carrots in the United States are down 45 percent.
#6 Year-to-date shipments of sweet corn in the United States are down 20 percent.
#7 Year-to-date shipments of sweet potatoes in the United States are down 13 percent.
#8 Year-to-date shipments of celery in the United States are down 11 percent.
#9 Total peach production in the U.S. is down 15 percent from last year.

I click the link to each of the nine facts. They link back to the same MSN article which is written by Laura Reiley. I find it humorous that a right wing website is linking back to an article written by a left wing political hack.
I also found it interesting that fact #1 is very specific about hard red winter wheat. All of these facts smell like a classic media trick: factual but not relevant. So I go to the USDA website and decide to plot the data for all wheat supply quarterly going back to 2007. Not just cherry pick hard red winter wheat.

Lo and Behold, total wheat production is just about near its all time high.
As long as prices are allowed to function there will be no food shortages.  If there are food shortages, it will be because of government imposed price controls. The same author wrote similar pieces about food shortages dating back to 2011. You can read one here.
Prediction: In the year 2023, you will not experience food shortages if you live in the first world.