Recently, I wrote an article regarding coming food shortages the world over, but particularly in the United States. I should say, food shortages are coming in the Western World, particularly those parts of the world that continue to cling to fanatical "health guidelines" that involve the shutting down of economies and normal life. These food shortages are no accident and there is a much deeper agenda here than can be covered in the pages of this article. Needless to say, I plan to do this in the very near future.
But, while the United States receives so much attention from readers of my articles, it's important to mention the scale of food shortages that are going to be seen not just here but in other places as well.
Case in point, Australia. The entire continent is now on total house arrest, with the level of totalitarianism and police state enforcement only rivaled by that of China.
Australia is now bracing to be out of domestically produced rice by Christmas. Yes, you read that right.
In an article by Aidan Wondracz entitled "Warning Australia is running out of RICE - and may not have a single homegrown grain left by Christmas," Wondracz writes,
Australia is facing a rice shortage with the country predicted to run out of the domestically-grown product by Christmas.
SunRice chief executive Rob Gordon warned families would soon be forced to eat rice imported from Vietnam as local supplies continued to dwindle.
'We are going to run out of Australian rice by Christmas,' he told The Daily Telegraph.
. . . . .
Low rainfall, dry weather and COVID-19 panic buying have all been linked to the diminishing stock.
SunRice, the country's biggest rice supplier, has lost more than $400million in exports.
The company has also been forced to cut its 600 strong workforce by one third in the New South Wales Riverina region - one of the biggest rice producing parts of the country.
The cutbacks come as the country records a poor harvest season for rice.
Low rainfall and dry conditions have led harvesting figures to dip by more than 90 per cent since 2017.
Last year, SunRice produced its second lowest rice crop.
Only 54,000 tonnes of rice was harvested - compared to its regular 800,000 tonnes.
Farmers have also blamed poor water allocation management on poor yields.
Growers say they have received little to no access to irrigated water.
'Our rice industry, 98 per cent of which is grown in southern NSW, is at risk of collapse with the last two years of zero water allocations,' NSW Water Minister Melinda Pavey said.
'While NSW was suffering through the worst drought on record, and our communities were living on zero general security allocations, South Australia was running the Lower Lakes at a minor flood level and released over 600,000 megalitres out over the barrages into the Southern Ocean.
COVID-19 panic buying has been regarded as the breaking point for the rice industry.
Shoppers stripped supermarket shelves bare of rice products, toilet paper and pasta in March.
Around the same time, experts sounded the alarm the frenzied shopping would only add further strain to the rice industry.
SunRice warned the demand was exceeding 'supply capability'.
The frenzied shopping forced prime minister Scott Morrison to phone the Vietnam president.
He reportedly made the call to ensure an Australian-owned factory in the country would be able to continue to export its rice to Australia despite closed borders.
Of course, all of this is happening as the United States is also facing its own looming food crisis. I wrote about this in a previous article where I said
Many of these manufacturing and packaging facilities as well as slaughterhouses were simply shut down as a result of intrusive totalitarian government reactions to an alleged pandemic. Combined with panic buying, the ability of those facilities to replace what was bought up was drastically reduced and, as a result, consumers were forced to wait weeks before they could buy what they needed (or wanted) again. Even then, they had to show up in the morning.
We are still experiencing those shortages, though better hidden due to a lack of panic buying, as anyone who shops regularly can tell you. You can find what you need but you may have to go to three stores to get it, where one would have done in the past.
To make matters worse, as millions of Americans are out of work due to the war launched on the domestic economy by State governments, workers were suddenly starting to organize, strike, and walk off the job, conveniently at a time when the food supply was already broken. These workers, of course, had not organized or initiated a strike at any time before when working conditions were bleak and wages were low. Now, however, when most rational people would simply be happy to have a job at all in the midst of such high unemployment, they were prepared to stop the wheels of the machine from working. While extraordinary times beget extraordinary reactions, the timing of the newfound sense of workers' resolve cannot go unnoticed.
At the same time, we witnessed farms dumping thousands of gallons of milk down the drain, meat producers slaughtering animals and burying them, and farmers destroying crops all over the country and the world. The reason for this is two-fold. First, many major producers would not want a glut of their product on the market and see the prices of that product drop down. Second, with the totalitarian measures forcing the shut down of restaurants across the country, many farms and producers simply lost a massive part of their market and thus had nowhere to send their products. Thus, it was destroyed.
A government truly concerned with the health of its people would have bought that produce and either distributed it or freeze dried and stored it for the coming apocalypse. Indeed, the Trump administration attempted this with some very minor success and high cost. Food banks at least benefited. But the damage to the food supply was already done.
As time moved forward, we saw devastating straight line winds blow across places like Iowa, destroying massive amounts of crops and farming infrastructure, effects rarely advertised on mainstream media outlets.
Following those winds, we saw massive wildfires along the entirety of the West coast from Washington to California and as far east as Colorado, South Dakota, and Texas. One need only take a look at the map at fires seemingly heading east, burning up prairies and farmland all along the way to see that the food chain is going to experience yet even more hiccups once the smoke is finally done billowing. But while leftists claim the fires are the natural result of "Climate Change" and Conservatives blame lack of adequate forest management (which has some merit), both completely ignore the fact that close to ten people were arrested for setting these fires. Repeatedly, arsonists are being arrested for starting blazes though the motive is unclear. Those of us who have studied history, however, can speculate with some certainty.
Perhaps Australia's rice crisis isn't the end of the world. But it is a sign of that end. Even if Vietnam, for some unknown reason, would decide to cut off the rice supply to Australia, the country may get along just fine without rice for the foreseeable future.
But the question is not just about rice. What else is in danger of becoming scarce in Australia? Few consumers even knew that a shortage of rice was in the works, instead finding out after the deal is already done. Now, with threats of a complete shortage by Christmas, panic buyers will assuredly reduce that supply even further. So what else is coming? What other food will disappear from Australian shelves? We simply don't know. But I would hazard a guess that rice won't be the only food Australians are missing anytime soon.
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