The Coming Global Food Shortage

While you will never hear about it on the mainstream news, and while we can all walk into supermarkets and buy as much food as we want right now, the truth is that a massive global food shortage is coming.  In fact, many scientists are now convinced that a horrific world famine is absolutely inevitable.  Why?  Well, as we will see below, it is a combination of things.  World population is exploding at the same time that overfarming, overfishing and environmental degradation are all starting to catch up with us.  The truth is that now is the time to start preparing.  Now is the time to build up an emergency food supply.  Now is the time to begin storing up food.  Because a food shortage that is so horrible that most of us cannot even imagine it is on the way, and when it hits it is going to be incredibly painful.

It is now being projected that global demand for food will more than double over the next 50 years.  Right now there are over 6 billion people on earth.  Around 2040 or so there will be 9 billion people on earth.  By the 2060s, there would be over 11 billion people on earth.  So where in the world are we going to get the food to feed all of those people? 

A global food shortage is coming.  There is no possible way that the world can produce enough food for that many people under the current system.

Already 1 billion people in the world go to bed hungry every single night.

Already somewhere in the world someone starves to death every 3.6 seconds and 3/4 of them are children under the age of 5.

Already approximately a third of all children in the world under the age of five suffer from serious malnutrition.

And the bad news is that the world simply does not have enough water to grow much more food.

Just consider the following quote from IWMI director general Colin Chartres....

"Current estimates indicate that we will not have enough water to feed ourselves in 25 years time, by when the current food crisis may turn into a perpetual crisis."

Not only that, but because of overfarming and pollution, we are rapidly losing farm land.  Today almost 25% of the world’s farm land is affected by serious environmental degradation.  That is up from 15% two decades ago.

In some of the biggest countries in the world the environmental situation is absolutely nightmarish.

For example, it is estimated by authorities that 75 percent of India's surface water is contaminated by human and agricultural waste.  The truth is that there is over a billion people in India, but sanitation is still only just starting to be developed in many areas.  So many people there just "use the toilet" wherever they can.  In fact, according to a UN study on sanitation, far more people in India have access to a mobile phone than to a toilet.

But it just isn't places like India where rampant environmental degradation is a problem.

It is happening in the United States too.

It turns out that many big American cattle farms actually feed chicken manure to cattle because it is so inexpensive and because we produce far too much of it to properly dispose of as fertilizer.

So are you eating beef that is from cattle that were fed chicken manure every day?

How would you know?

Not only that, but the world cannot get much more food out of the oceans either.  29 percent of world fisheries are in a state of collapse according to Canadian scientist Boris Worm, and in the years ahead the world fishing industry may actually produce less food rather than more food.

But much more food will be needed in the years ahead.

The really sad thing is that we waste so much food right now.  In developed countries we throw away anywhere from one-third to one-half of all food produced.

Considering the fact that so many people in the world are suffering from a lack of food, that is absolutely criminal.

In the years ahead we won't be wasting that much food.  That is for certain.  We will look back on these days when there was plenty of food with longing.  These are still good times.  Even though the world economy is starting to spin out of control, the truth is that we haven't seen anything yet.  A devastating world economic collapse is on the way, and a global food shortage will follow shortly thereafter.

Are you ready?