Full screen recommended.
Finance Hour, 5/10/26
"People Will Fight Over Food This Summer,
It's Already Starting"
"People will fight over food this summer. It's already starting. In Bangladesh right now people are beating gas station managers to death over fuel shortages caused by the Strait of Hormuz closure according to the Washington Post. The Philippines declared a state of emergency March 24th. Myanmar restricted driving to alternate days. Nepal is filling only half of cooking gas cylinders. In March 2020 Americans fistfought in Costco over toilet paper and pulled knives in Walmart parking lots over cases of water. That was toilet paper. Now imagine the product is bread. Eggs. Milk. Chicken. Rice. 47.4 million Americans already live in food insecure households according to the USDA, an increase of 13.5 million compared to 2021. The weekly SNAP allowance for a family of four is $192.84. The average national cost of a week's worth of groceries is $226.20.
One in three Americans skipped a meal in the past year according to the Century Foundation. The USDA Emergency Food Assistance Program has had $500 million of its funding paused. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act cut $187 billion from SNAP over the next decade. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates 9 million SNAP recipients could lose benefits entirely. The Farm Bill passed April 30th by a vote of 224 to 200 and failed to restore the SNAP cuts. U.S. diesel rose from $3.89 to $5.37 per gallon in two weeks according to PBS. U.S. fertilizer prices rose more than 40 percent in one month after the war began. A food economist at Michigan State University told CNN the full impact takes six months or longer to reach food prices. Six months from February 28th is late August. National Retail Federation documented inventory shrinkage reaching $112 billion in 2023. Stores are locking food behind plexiglass and closing locations in low-income neighborhoods creating food deserts. Between 2010 and 2011 food prices surged 40 percent and four governments fell.
Peer-reviewed research from the New England Complex Systems Institute and studies in Nature converge on one finding: rising food prices are a precipitating condition for social unrest. The United States has 400 million firearms in civilian hands. Consumer sentiment is at the lowest level in 75 years of measurement. School lunch programs feeding 30 million children end in June. Grocery shelves hold 72 hours of inventory at any given time."
Comments here:
No comments:
Post a Comment