Record-Breaking Food Inflation Comes During End Time Events

The FAO’s food price index, which tracks global prices for a basket of staple foods, averaged 124.4 points in September, up 3.0% from August. Food prices saw their fastest increase in 18 months in September, with the prices of all commodity groups rising, led by sugar, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations said.

Egg prices spiked by 28.1% in August from 12 months ago, easily the most significant increase of any food item tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The main culprit for rising egg prices is a familiar one: the so-called bird flu.

Birds are getting sick, which means fewer eggs and higher prices at the grocery store. They say that a highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), more commonly known as the bird flu, has impacted nearly 101 million birds across 48 U.S. states since January 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). So health officials simply say kill them all, so the egg supply is shrinking. But what is the problem? Is it a virus or the highly toxic torturous conditions in which chickens are grown? Chicken concentration camps produce sickness and death.

China

Food Prices Are Going Up in China. The prices of fresh produce from cabbages to cucumbers — items integral to the diets of millions across China — have surged on a combination of disruptive weather and roiled logistics. Among the recent challenges was the hit from Typhoon Bebinca, the strongest storm in over seven decades to strike Shanghai and the neighboring Yangtze River Delta region.

Inflation remains a significant issue, with grocery prices being a particular concern for American families. Under the Biden-Harris administration, the cost of groceries has increased by over 21%. Polls indicate that inflation is a top concern for voters, with 77% of Americans considering it a “critical” issue.

United Kingdom

Already, we have read that the cost of the cheapest brands of food and drink in the U.K. has surged more than that of premium brands over the past two years, leaving the poorest people in the country shouldering the highest burden from inflation, an analysis showed. The Institute for Fiscal Studies said that the price of the least expensive goods in grocery stores jumped 32.6% from 2021 to 2023.

The price of the U.K.’s favorite fast food skyrockets: The cost of fish and chips has surged by over 50% in the past five years.

Egypt’s biggest-ever wheat tender, nearly 20 times its usual size, stemmed from food security concerns that will lead to higher international wheat prices. Food security is a growing concern everywhere. It is no fun to be hungry and unable to afford the food you need.

A former FBI specialist who was persecuted for questioning
on January 6 said during a hearing with lawmakers on Capitol
Hill that Americans should stock up on food and prepare for hardship.

The intense cold snap that swept through southern Brazil is expected to have significantly affected several crops, particularly wheat. In Rio Grande do Sul, where nearly a quarter of the state’s 1.31 million hectares of wheat is in the crucial flowering stage, frost damage has already been reported. A report from the state agency Emater/R.S., released on Thursday, highlights growing concerns over potential yield losses during this critical phase of crop development.

Brutalizing Farmers –– Induced Famine

Farmers are feeling the impact of the Russian war, inflation,
the rising costs of energy, and the rising cost of fertilizers.

Farmers are being ‘brutalized’ as costs ‘go through the roof’ in the last days of Biden’s America. “Within the agriculture sector, we’re in a recession right now,” Brent Johnson, a farmer and president of the Iowa Farm Bureau, said over the weekend.

“We’ve seen a lot of job losses. We’re seeing negative balance sheets. It’s become very challenging.” Soaring costs are crippling farmers while the international market for American-grown food has slowed to a crawl “with no new trade deals” under the current administration, said Johnson.

“It doesn’t take somebody with a PhD to figure out that the math isn’t working and that we’ve got to do something to offset what’s been going on,” John Boyd, a Virginia farmer and founder of the National Black Farmers Association in Virginia, said in a phone interview. “We’re paying $5 a gallon for diesel, and it was probably around $2 a gallon five years ago,” he said. “All of these costs have gone through the roof, all the input costs — but the prices for corn and soybeans are down.”

Boyd added that the economics “make it very difficult to stay alive. And then you have an administration that hasn’t been aggressive in helping us.” According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, about 6,000 farms closed in 2023 alone, though it is part of a more significant trend dating back decades.

The Enormous Scale Of Global Food Waste Does Not Help

Anna Fleck writes, “As more than one trillion U.S. dollars worth of food is thrown away yearly, up to 783 million people are affected by hunger. At the same time, food waste generates an estimated 8-10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and takes up the equivalent of nearly 30 percent of the world’s agricultural land. These are just some of the findings published in the United Nations Environment Programme’s Food Waste Report 2024.”