by Michael Snyder
"Experts are warning that a historic global food crisis has begun. Food prices have already been rising for years, and now they are about to go significantly higher. The number of impoverished people in the world suffering from acute hunger was already at an all-time record high coming into this year, and it is being projected that 49 million more impoverished people will be added to that total in 2026. We are facing a Super El Niño, a painful global fertilizer shortage and a very alarming cyclosporiasis outbreak all at the same time. We really are in unprecedented territory, and the months ahead are certainly going to be quite chaotic.
If you doubt this, just consider the chaos that we just witnessed in Ceuta. Approximately 60,000 migrants from Morocco suddenly came storming in, and most people have no idea why it happened. The primary reason why those migrants are so desperate is because they are hungry. A nightmarish drought that never seems to end in Morocco “nearly halved its cereal harvests and erased 720,000 agricultural jobs”…
And this week, the pressure reached Europe’s own border. In two days, close to 60,000 people crossed from Morocco into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, more than 50 people dying in the attempt, and within hours France had tightened its border with Spain and Italy had suspended Schengen. No single cause explains a border crisis, and this one has geopolitics stacked through it. But the ground it grew from is well documented: seven years of drought, Morocco’s worst in four decades, nearly halved its cereal harvests and erased 720,000 agricultural jobs, pushing rural families toward the cities, the coast, and beyond, an out-migration the World Bank’s climate report on Morocco predicted in almost exactly these terms. Climate pressure does not stay in the elsewhere column. This week it swam around a border fence. The global food crisis that I have been relentlessly warning my readers about is not coming. It is already here.
In Europe, the “hottest June ever recorded” did an immense amount of crop damage…"June 2026 was the hottest June ever recorded in western Europe, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service. France logged its hottest nationally averaged day on record; Germany, Denmark and the Czech Republic set all-time highs. It was the third major heatwave since late May, arriving while crops were most vulnerable.
The damage forced an almost unheard-of response from the grain trade itself. COCERAL, the association of Europe’s cereal traders, published an extraordinary, out-of-cycle forecast, cutting expected EU and UK grain production to 286.6 million tonnes, roughly 9 million below its own June estimate. The total is also 23.4 million tonnes below last year, though that larger year-on-year gap cannot all be blamed on the June heat."
Those numbers are really bad, but in my opinion they are way too optimistic. The situation is particularly dire in the UK. Wales and England just experienced their “driest July in at least 190 years”, and as a result harvest season is going to be a total disaster…It comes as Wales and England reel from their driest July in at least 190 years, forcing all the former and half the latter into drought. Total output for barley, oats, and oilseed rape – key ingredients used in bread, beer, breakfast cereals, and livestock feed – is projected to drop to just 19.5 million tons this year. That would undercut the previous low of 19.8m tonnes in 2020, making it the poorest yield since detailed record-keeping began in 1984.
This is what a Super El Niño looks like. While barley crops in the UK are withering, here in the United States it is being projected that we will have “the smallest wheat crop in more than half a century”…In the United States, the USDA forecasts the smallest wheat crop in more than half a century, with planted area the lowest since records began in 1919 and hard red winter wheat, the bread wheat of the Great Plains, the smallest since 1957 after severe drought.
We are being told that the Super El Niño could cause trillions of dollars in economic damage, and the global fertilizer shortage could have a similar long-term impact. Let that sink in for a moment. This is not just a small bump in the road. This is a major historical event.
My regular readers know how I feel about the World Economic Forum. Normally, I don’t agree with the World Economic Forum about anything. But even the World Economic Forum has been forced to admit that the global fertilizer shortage will cause “cascading shocks that reduce future food production”…The Strait of Hormuz is one of the world’s most critical chokepoints. Before the conflict, roughly 35% of global crude oil exports, 20% of liquefied natural gas exports, and up to 30% of fertilizer exports transited through this narrow strip of water – along with sulfur, essential for phosphate fertilizer production. The blockade has severely disrupted global fertilizer supply chains just as planting seasons advance across both hemispheres.
As farmers face urea fertilizer price increases of 20% to 60%, on top of rising fuel, transport, and irrigation costs, the greatest risk is not immediate food shortages but rather cascading shocks that reduce future food production. It begins with energy-price spikes and logistics disruptions, followed by fertilizer shortages, then lower yields, with delayed transmission effects eventually leading to higher food prices and market volatility months later.
When the World Economic Forum starts putting out material that sounds like it could have come out of one of my articles, it is a sign that things have gotten really bad.
NPR is sounding the alarm too. One expert that was recently interviewed by NPR admitted that the upcoming harvest will be a big problem…"So today, we have enough food available, and we have enough stocks. The problem is for the next harvest. For the next harvest, as we move towards the middle of the year and the end of the year, we will have less supply, less stocks, and as a result, higher prices. And this will exacerbate more next year if this situation doesn’t stop. If the situation improves tomorrow, if you open the Strait of Hormuz tomorrow, we will still have higher prices because of less supply, because farmers already made a decision, but we could avoid a significant crisis by the end of the year or 2027."
Harvest season is rapidly approaching in the northern hemisphere, and we aren’t ready for what is about to happen. Meanwhile, some farmers in California are actually “trashing their lettuce crop and throwing the vegetables back into the soil” because so many people are now avoiding lettuce completely due to the nationwide cyclosporiasis outbreak…"A nationwide explosive diarrhea crisis that has left thousands clinging to their toilets and hospitalized others also seems to have another victim: lettuce growers in California. Some like Larry Cox, who runs Coastline Family Farms in Salinas Valley, are trashing their lettuce crop and throwing the vegetables back into the soil as demand for the crop dries up, the Wall Street Journal reported. This week, Cox dumped 300,000 pounds of his romaine hearts."
I will admit that I am avoiding all store-bought lettuce right now. I certainly don’t want to be the next victim. Of course most lettuce is perfectly safe, but there is no way for ordinary consumers to tell what is good to eat and what is not good to eat. Unfortunately, I believe that food safety will continue to be a very big story for quite some time.
According to the chief economist of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, we are facing a confluence of factors that has created a “perfect storm” which will really drive up global food prices in the months ahead…The world is on the verge of another bout of food inflation as wars in Iran and Ukraine along with El Nino create a perfect storm of higher costs and lower crop yields, the chief economist of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization said. I know that food prices are already absurd. But I would recommend stocking up now before food prices go even higher.
In impoverished nations around the world, rising food prices will push tens of millions more people into acute hunger… A powerful El Niño weather event could push an additional nearly 49 million people into acute food insecurity across some of the world’s most vulnerable regions by the end of next year, the World Food Program said on Wednesday.
Despite all of our advanced technology, and despite the billions of dollars that are given to international aid organizations, global hunger is worse than ever and starving people are literally dropping dead right now in Eastern Africa and other impoverished areas of the globe.
I am one of the few prominent voices that has been writing about this crisis over and over again. Now I am telling my readers that this crisis is about to get substantially worse. The world is not even going to come close to producing enough food to feed everyone this year, and the chaotic scenes that we just witnessed in Ceuta will soon be repeated all over the planet."
