Food Inflation
There has been a huge rise in nearly all grain prices over the past year. The price for Soybeans started 2020 at around $8.50 per bushel. It now trades around $14.00 per bushel. Corn prices started 2020 at around $3.80 per bushel. It now trades around $4.80 per bushel. With both of these grains in thousands of food products, there is going to be a huge rise in food inflation.
For many decades there has been a race between the birth rate and our ability to produce more food to feed a hungry global population. In the 1940s, a yield of 40 bushels per acre was the average for corn crops. In 2020 farmers managed to get to a record corn yield estimate of 181.8 bushels per acre.
In the past few years, corn crops have suffered an endless series of bad luck events that lowered yields. The past three years that we have completed growing records were all years of decline. The 2020 season is still being counted.
2017 -3.56 %
2018 -1.84 %
2019 -5.02 %
When the final numbers come in for 2020, they will not be good. Last year we had a drought in the western plain states and a massive windstorm over Eastern Iowa and central Illinois.
Grain production will be down in South Africa. This area of the world received lower yields because of too much rain that flooded fields.
In South America there was a lack of rainfall. Soybean production in top-producer Brazil was pegged at 133.00 million tonnes, unchanged from the previous outlook. Brazil’s corn harvest was seen at 109.00 million tonnes. In Argentina, where farmers have struggled with drought throughout the growing season, USDA predicted a soybean harvest of 48.00 million tonnes and a corn harvest of 47.50 million tonnes. The crop yield was so bad in Brazil and Argentina that the government lowered the ability of exporters to send grain outside the country.
Russia is raising a previously announced export tax on the grain from the currently planned 25 euros ($30) per tonne to 50 euros ($60) per ton. Russia, one of the world’s largest wheat exporters, is trying to stabilize domestic food prices with the wheat export levy as well as a grain export quota and a series of other measures after President Vladimir Putin criticized the impact of excessive inflation.
China has had a very bad year in the 2020 growing season. There were drought conditions in the north, heavy floods in the central area of the nation, and the south had grain-munching bugs in various regions of the country. Because China is so secretive about production numbers, it’s hard to get the true picture of Chinese food needs.
In 2019 China had entered into a food war with the U.S, so it reduced grain imports to punish Washington. In 2019 China only used 67% of its annual quota for corn and one-third of its quota for wheat.
Things must be at dire levels in China because that nation’s grain imports soared to record highs in 2020. China bought a record 11.3 million tonnes of imported corn last year, according to General Administration of Customs data, exceeding the annual quota – which was set at 7.2 million tonnes. China also imported a record 8.38 million tonnes of wheat.
The list below shows a year over year increase in China’s imports of several key commodities:
Corn 135.7%
Wheat 140.2%
Barley 36.3%
Sorghum 478.6%
Pork 108.3%
Sugar 55.5%
Another sign that the food situation in China must be very bleak is China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs approved two genetically modified corn varieties from Bayer AG and Syngenta AG for import. The corn strains, MON87411 and MZIR098, are approved for imports for five years starting December 2020. China has also approved several locally produced genetically modified corn varieties.
Several nations have become net imports of large amounts of grain. India’s boom population is soon to become a massive drain on global grain reserves. Last year Colombia made a very odd purchase of 108,000 metric tons of corn. When you realize that France is the only nation in Europe that could feed its own people, you can see how quickly the world can get into trouble.
It is very unusual to have so many grain-growing regions all having a production problem at the same time. In 2021 there is going to be a massive effort to make up for the losses by vastly increasing acreage. If we have good weather, we will have a bumper crop, and grain prices will stabilize.
Last year Beijing sent out a small army of grain buyers to purchase huge amounts of grain to fulfill China’s massive grain needs. This may be the year that they are sent back home empty-handed. Since bad luck has become a permanent fixture in food production, I can only conclude that these events are the lead-up to the great famine that will play out during the tribulation.
“And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand. And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine” (Rev 6:5-6, KJV).
“And great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven” (Luke 21:11, KJV).
— Todd
God’s Awesome Control
Boy has yours truly been off in his assessment of America with regard to God’s Power to Control events!
At present it seems it’s over for the nation in terms of ever returning to any semblance of that envisioned by its founding fathers. Those who are believers in Jesus Christ as mankind’s only hope are filled with worry and dark expectations for the future. This state of many Christians is somewhat of an oxymoron, or would that be a paradox, or even, possibly, a dichotomy?
At any rate, it smacks of being a contradiction in terms. We look to the Creator of all that is as our blessed hope (Titus 2: 13) and yet we look at our future as full of extreme gloom. As the Apostle Peter might say, “My brethren, such things ought not be…”
I was reflecting back in the nation’s recent history and came across just how naïve I’ve been about the Lord’s ability to shape, move and restrain evil in America and the world.
I’ll try to demonstrate. The following is a lengthy excerpt from an article or chapter I believe I wrote around the time of my book The American Apocalypse, which Harvest House published back in 2009.
[Excerpt]
Change that was promised as part of the American presidential campaign leading to the 2008 election of Barak Hussein Obama is rapidly taking on form and substance. Its monstrous reality no longer lurks about in the shadows of diplomatic obfuscation designed to misdirect and divert. I am convinced we are witnessing the emergence of the end-times entity Daniel and John foresaw under divine revelation.
Acceleration of developments in every area of U.S. global interaction brings focus and magnification to the fact that America is being deliberately and masterfully diminished—brought into configuration for purposes of producing governing authority of immensely ominous scope and power.
Prophecy students have for decades puzzled over the fact that smaller nation-states, like Libya, Syria, even Egypt, are mentioned as having prophetic prominence in the Bible. Yet, the greatest super power ever to exist on Planet Earth doesn’t rate even a slight mention, except obliquely, perhaps, in Ezekiel 38: 13, as one of the “young lions”. What happens to the great United States of America that relegates it to a non-player as prophecy comes to culmination?
The church today, and there is but one people within that designation—all truly born again believers in Jesus Christ—is for the most part, deliriously happy within its almost total ignorance of biblically prophesied things to come. The majority don’t know about what is prophetically scheduled to happen to their world. They don’t want to know, and are protected in their ignorance by pastors and teachers who harbor the same attitude.
Those within the church who do know and care are, mostly trepidatious about the prospects for America and the world. The trepidation ranges the spectrum from: the U.S. will suffer total economic melt-down and degeneration into chaos and anarchy that will bring about dictatorship and incarceration in FEMA camps, to America will become so weakened that she will be nuked out of existence by the likes of Russia, China, and even maybe a soon-to-be nuclear Iran.
If I may be so audacious, I will propose the third possibility I believe I see clearly now as the terminus for this once great republic. To be honest, I have suspected this will be the scenario for America all along, and have written of my suspicion in a number of essays.
I believe the change promised by the current presidential administration, as part of that being orchestrated over the past several decades, is at this very moment bringing the U.S. into the foretold union to be ruled by history’s most lawless tyrant. The disregard by this president for the U.S. Constitution, in itself a totally lawless modus operandi, in conjunction with a congress that hasn’t the fortitude to oppose this iniquitous action, is, itself, proof we are in the time of America’s demise and Antichrist’s ascent.
No. I am not saying Barak Obama is the prophesied first beast of Revelation chapter 13. This president is, however, in concert with several administrations previous, and with the help of the many globalist movers and shakers over the past decades and even centuries, complicit in forcing this apex nation into the globalist mold.
The force behind the globalist agenda has been incessantly at work to impress upon the American populace—and the world at large—that the United States is an unjust, even a criminally oppressive state.
[end of excerpt]
Did you get all that? The vast majority of those who were Christians gave developments in the presidential election of 2008 little thought. Those of us who watched what was going on in prophetic stage-setting were thinking America was finished as it was founded.
It is about the same at this very moment. Most are going about their daily, minute by minute lives with little or no regard that America is dissolving before their apparently uncaring gazes. Those of us who still do watch for Him, Who is our blessed hope, are even more convinced with these turn of events that America’s days are likely over as founded.
Both attitudes miss the mark as they stand at opposite ends of the matter. Those who don’t seem to be concerned are being mesmerized by the grand delusion that everything is unchanged and will eventually settle in to the old normality. Those who worry that this time…this time it’s over for our nation are forgetting just Who our God is. That is, we are forgetting the Awesome Power He Wields.
The 2016 presidential election, we thought, was lost. Now the global order would swallow the last vestiges of liberty we enjoyed under the Constitution. That much feared candidate would soon have us in FEMA camps…or worse.
Then the Lord’s Mighty Right Hand clamped down upon the wildly spinning out of control situation. A Make America Great Again reality show celebrity was thrust into the mix and did the impossible. He won!
The next four years were spent in reversing the globalist course, while the proponents of such went absolutely berserk with rage that their plans had been halted. God, in Heaven, had not the least bit of strain in clamping down. He will have no trouble doing so now –when and howsoever He chooses.
“I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me: I girded thee, though thou hast not known me: That they may know from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none beside me. I am the LORD, and there is none else.” (Isa 45: 5-6)
–Terry