The Global Food Catastrophe, Caused By Political Sabotage
Europe Reloaded / TLB Staff
Towards a global food catastrophe, caused by acts of political sabotage
Biden cynically uses Ukraine to cover up food sabotage
F. WILLIAM ENGDAHL
It’s starting to look like some bad actors are deliberately taking action to guarantee a coming global food crisis. Every step the Biden administration’s strategists take to “control energy inflation” damages the supply or inflates the price of natural gas, oil and coal in the global economy. This has a huge impact on fertilizer prices and food production. It started long before Ukraine. Today, reports are circulating that Biden’s men have intervened to block fertilizer rail transportation at the most critical time for spring plantings. From this fall, the effects will be explosive.
With spring planting in the United States in its critical phase, CF Industries of Deerfield, Illinois, the largest U.S. supplier of nitrogen fertilizer as well as a vital diesel engine additive, released a press release stating that “On Friday, April 8, 2022, Union Pacific advised CF Industries without notice that it was requesting certain shippers to reduce the volume of private cars on its railroad effective immediately.” Union Pacific is one of four major railroads that together transport some 80% of all US agricultural rail freight. CF company CEO Tony Will said, “This Union Pacific action couldn’t come at a worse time for farmers. Not only will fertilizers be delayed by these shipping restrictions, but the extra fertilizer needed to make spring applications may not be able to get to farmers at all. By imposing this arbitrary restriction on just a handful of shippers, Union Pacific is jeopardizing farmers’ crops and increasing the cost of food to consumers”. CF has issued urgent calls for the Biden administration to address the situation, with no positive action taken so far.
Direct sabotage
CF Industries noted that it was one of 30 companies subject to the harsh measure, which is indefinite. It ships its products via Union Pacific rail lines, primarily from its Donaldsonville complex in Louisiana and its Port Neal complex in Iowa, to serve major agricultural states including Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Texas and California. The ban will affect nitrogen fertilizers such as urea and urea ammonium nitrate (UAN), as well as diesel exhaust fluid, DEF (called AdBlue in Europe). DEF is an emission control product required today for diesel trucks. Without it, engines cannot work. It is made from urea. CF Industries is the largest producer of urea, the production facility for these products in North America.
At the same time, the Biden gang announced a bogus cure for record gas prices at the pump. Washington has announced that the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will allow a 50% increase in the fuel mix of biodiesel and corn ethanol for the summer. On April 12, the Secretary of Agriculture announced a “bold” move by the US administration to increase the use of domestically produced corn- and ethanol-based biofuels. Secretary of State Tom Vilsack claimed that the move would “reduce energy prices and tackle rising consumer prices caused by Putin’s (sic) price hike by harnessing the strong future and brilliant of the biofuels industry.”
Only the capitalized “Putin Price Rise” is not the result of Russian actions, but of Washington’s green energy decisions to phase out oil and gas. Energy price inflation is also set to rise significantly in the coming months due to US and European economic sanctions on the export of Russian oil and gas. However, the crux of the matter is that every acre of US farmland devoted to growing corn for biofuels takes that crop out of the food chain, to burn it for fuel. Since the passage of the US Renewable Fuel Standards Act in 2007, which imposed production targets for maize intended for the manufacture of ethanol blends increasing each year, biofuels took up a considerable share of the total area devoted to maize, i.e. more than 40% in 2015. This evolution, imposed by the law, towards the burning of corn for fuel led to major inflation in food prices long before the onset of the inflation crisis. The United States is by far the largest producer and exporter of corn in the world. Mandating a significant increase in corn ethanol for fuel at a time when fertilizer prices are astronomical and railroad shipments of fertilizers are apparently blocked by orders from the White House will cause corn prices to explode. Washington knows this very well.
It’s no wonder the price of U.S. corn hit a 10-year high in mid-April, as major source exports from Russia and Ukraine are now blocked by sanctions and the war. Besides the inefficient use of U.S. corn for biodiesel supply, Biden’s latest ethanol initiative will only aggravate the growing food crisis while doing nothing to lower gas prices in the United States. American silage corn is primarily used for livestock, swine, and poultry feed, as well as human food. This cynical ordering of biofuels has nothing to do with the “energy independence” of the United States.
In what is clearly becoming a US administration war on food, the situation is dramatically worsened by USDA demands that chicken farmers kill millions of chickens in now 27 states, allegedly for signs of bird flu infection. The H5N1 bird flu “virus” was revealed in 2015 to be a complete hoax. The tests used by US government inspectors to determine bird flu are now the same unreliable PCR tests used for COVID in humans. The test has no value in this regard. US government officials estimate that since the first cases ‘tested’ positive in February, at least 23 million chickens and turkeys have been slaughtered to supposedly contain the spread of a disease whose cause may be the incredibly unsanitary CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation) cage confinement of mass industrial chickens. The result is a steep rise in the price of eggs of some 300% since November and a severe loss of chicken protein sources for American consumers, at a time when general cost-of-living inflation has never been higher for 40 years.
To make matters worse, California and Oregon are once again declaring a water emergency amid a multi-year drought and sharply reducing irrigation water for California farmers, who produce most of the fruit. and American fresh vegetables. This drought has since spread to most of the farmland west of the Mississippi River, that is, to much of the US farmland.
America’s food security has never been more at risk since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and the Biden administration’s “green agenda” is doing everything to compound the impact on its citizens.
In recent comments, US President Biden remarked, without elaboration, that food shortages in the United States “are going to be real.” His administration is also deaf to calls from farmers’ organizations to allow the cultivation of some 4 million acres of farmland ordered abandoned for “environmental reasons.” However, it is not the only region of the world where the food crisis is growing.
A global disaster
These deliberate actions by Washington come at a time when a series of global food disasters are creating the worst food supply situation in decades, if not since the end of World War II.
In the EU, which depends heavily on Russia, Belarus and Ukraine for its feed grains, fertilizers and energy, the sanctions are significantly worsening food shortages caused by Covid. The EU is using its stupid green program as an excuse to ban the Italian government from ignoring EU rules limiting state aid to farmers. In Germany, the Green Party’s new agriculture minister, Cem Özdemir, who wants to phase out traditional farming, allegedly for its “greenhouse gas” emissions, has responded coldly to farmers who want to grow more crops. The EU faces many of the same dire food security threats as the US and an even greater reliance on Russian energy.
Major food-producing countries in South America, particularly Argentina and Paraguay, are in the grip of severe drought attributed to a periodic La Niña anomaly in the Pacific, which has crippled crops in this region. Fertilizer sanctions from Belarus and Russia threaten crops in Brazil, compounded by bottlenecks in shipping.
China has just announced that, due to heavy rains in 2021, this year’s winter wheat harvest could be the worst in its history.The CCP also instituted harsh measures to induce farmers to expand their cultivation to non-farm land, to little effect. According to a report by Erik Mertz, China Observer, “In the Chinese provinces of Jilin, Heilongjiang and Liaoning, authorities reported that one in three farmers do not have enough seed and fertilizer to start planting for the optimal spring period… According to sources in these regions, they are stuck waiting for seeds and fertilizers that have been imported into China from overseas – and are stuck in cargo ships off Shanghai”. Shanghai, the largest container port in the world, has been under a bizarre “Zero Covid” total quarantine for more than four weeks, with no end in sight. In a desperate attempt by the CCP to “order” an increase in food production, local CCP officials across China have begun transforming basketball courts and even roads into arable land. The food situation in China is forcing the country to import far more at a time of global shortages, driving up global grain and food prices even further.
Africa is also badly affected by the sanctions imposed by the United States and by the war which puts an end to exports of food and fertilizers from Russia and Ukraine. Thirty-five African countries get food from Russia and Ukraine. Twenty-two African countries import fertilizer from these countries. Alternatives are sorely lacking as prices soar and supply collapses. Famine is announced.
David M. Beasley, Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Programme, said recently of the global food outlook: “There has been no precedent even close since World War II.”
Notably, it was Biden’s Treasury Department that compiled a list of the most comprehensive economic sanctions against Russia and Belarus, pressuring a complacent EU to dutifully follow through, sanctions whose impact on the world supply and prices of grains and fertilizers and energy were entirely predictable. It was actually a sanction against the United States and the global economy.
These are just the latest examples of deliberate sabotage of the food chain by the US government under Biden’s green agenda, the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Bill Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation, as part of of their dystopian Great Reset eugenics program. Traditional agriculture must be replaced with a synthetic, lab-grown diet of fake meats and protein sourced from grasshoppers and worms around the world. All for the supposed glory of controlling the global climate. It’s really crazy.
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