When the USA and NATO countries engaged in economic warfare against Russia by de-platforming Russian banks from the SWIFT system in March, it set off a chain reaction of world events that will lead to global famine and food scarcity panic.
Fertilizer and the natural gas used to manufacture fertilizer are now in short supply around the world. Many prominent food producers such as India have turned to export bans (food protectionism) to secure their own domestic supplies, worsening global food scarcity. Rising fuel costs have only added to the problems, resulting in far higher costs of farm inputs across the world.
But now America’s domestic food production is collapsing as well — and seemingly for the same reasons. Sky-high fertilizer costs, fertilizer scarcity, insanely elevated diesel fuel prices and supply chain problems affecting agriculture equipment are all contributing to an alarming trend across America: More and more farmers are simply not planting crops.
There’s no economic reason to do so. Rising fertilizer prices make the crops a money loser from day one. Even if a farmer invests in the fertilizer, his ability to harvest and transport the resulting crops out of his own fields is increasingly questionable. Worsening the situation, drought conditions are so bad that rice farmers in California, for example, are being told by the water control authorities there that they will only be allowed 0.4 acre feet of water per acre. You can’t grow rice in less than five inches of water for the entire season.
So they’re not planting most of the rice. Only 70,000 acres are getting planted out of 450,000 acres that could be used. Worsening the shortage, California has decided to divert water into the Pacific Ocean for environmental reasons, rather than let rice farmers use the water to grow food. From that story:
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