My recent posts have included such topics as a UN warning about a pending global food shortage, a super-locust swarm threatening food supplies in at least nine African nations, and the coronavirus closing a large American pork-processing plant in my home city of Sioux Falls, SD. All these topics touch on a subject close to all of our interests: Will we have enough food in the future? This post adds more information on this topic.
The first four links address the growing meat supply crisis in the USA. Many supermarkets and grocery stores throughout the USA are now rationing meat supplies to customers, limiting meat packages bought by each consumer to only three or four packages per shopper. The first link is from my local newspaper and focuses on supermarkets here in my city that are rationing quantities of meat being bought by each shopper. However, this condition is spreading throughout our nation as the coronavirus is infecting meat plant workers everywhere. This applies to beef, pork, and poultry supplies, but pork products seem the most endangered. The second link is from a Texas media source and the third link focuses mainly on Minnesota. The fourth link mentions the national aspect of this growing crisis. It seems to be most incongruous that meat shortages are occurring even here in the American Midwest where so much of our nation’s meat is produced. The fifth link reveals that approximately 20% of the franchises owned by Wendy’s, a main hamburger fast-food chain in the USA, have run out of hamburger supplies and can’t make their main food selections for the time being.
The sixth link describes what is to, me, a heartbreaking situation in America’s food supply crisis. Many tens of thousands of pigs and cattle and millions of chickens are being euthanized because the regular purchasers of these meat products (school districts, restaurants, caterers, food-sellers at endless sports stadium events) have almost all closed operations. Much of the supply chain demand for meat products has simply ended in our nation (and all nations face the same problems to varying degrees). No one knows when or whether the old levels of demand will ever revert back to normal. How many restaurants will never re-open after long lock-downs? How many laid-off people will be able to afford tickets to sporting events where they would normally consume tons of food products? Think of every school’s kitchen facilities being closed. Think of most restaurants being closed. Think of all sporting events being shut down at the high school, collegiate, and professional levels everywhere in the nation. Even when sporting events are resumed, it is expected they will take place without fans. That means there will be no demand for concessions and food products generated by sporting events even if they are played. Colleges and schools that stick with “remote learning” and “on-line” options also mean those educational institutions will generate no on-site food demands either. If there is a greatly reduced demand for food supplies in the post-coronavirus environment, it will inevitably result in a reduced supply as well. With America’s unemployment rate now at levels not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s, laid-off people who can’t pay their bills won’t be buying much meat. The seventh link attempts to describe some of the bizarre economics that are present in our food supply chains. Did you ever expect to see millions of dead livestock and poultry carcasses being dumped into landfills instead of being butchered for meat products in the nation’s food supply?
In ancient times, having “many flocks and herds” was a great blessing. If you wanted meat to eat, a clan or tribe would have skilled butchers who could process domesticated animals or game animals into meat. In our upside-down world, having a surplus of food is considered a financial curse. This kind of crazy economics cannot be a reliable base for a dependable food supply.
The eighth link and ninth link relate to how China has taken over control of a large percentage of America’s meat-processing capacity. Indeed, the huge pork-production facility in my city of residence, Sioux Falls, is owned by Chinese interests. It has now been physically reconfigured to implement as many CDC guidelines as possible for social distancing, and limited production is now resuming. A “new normal” level of production is expected by the end of this month. Another huge pork-production facility in Worthington, Minnesota (a nearby city) was also shuttered due to coronavirus infections. It had a limited number of workers who were recently called back to work, but not to produce any meat for anyone to eat. The workers were called back to help producers kill their pigs so they could be, assumedly, be dumped in landfills.
Let me see if I follow the dots correctly. China has some of its large corporations buy up large portions of America’s meat-production companies. A few years later, a new coronavirus originates in Wuhan, China, and Chinese Communist Party bosses decide to secretly let it spread everywhere during the Chinese New Year celebrations when travel is widespread. It spreads to Europe and the world via commercial airliners. By the time the world learns about how dangerous the pandemic is, it is too late to isolate it where it began. One thing is for sure: this coronavirus has a “Made in China” pedigree. No one disputes that it originated in China. When the Chinese-originated virus sickens many people in Chinese-owned meat-packing plants in America, the owners shut them down. This results in a food supply crisis that causes meat shortages for consumers and causes millions of livestock and poultry to be killed and buried instead of being processed into meat. The results of the “Made in China” coronavirus is that the USA and western nations (China’s likely rivals in a future regional or world war) are teetering on the edge of a new Great Depression and are facing food shortages. If they slip into Depressions, the western nations will have to cut their military forces to lower levels that can be financially sustained. That outcome would be a huge benefit to China. I’m sure this is all a great coincidence…aren’t you?
We are entering a dangerous time in world history. This period of time was prophesied in the Bible and is called by such names as “the latter days,” “time of the end,” etc. In this period of time at the end of our age, Mathew 24:3-8 prophesies famines and pestilences as marking the arrival of this climactic time. Revelation 6:5-6 also prophesies about food shortages in the latter days and warns food will be costly and/or rationed by price. For abundant evidence that we are living in these prophesied times, please read my article, Are We Living in the Biblical Latter Days? For insights into how our age will be climaxed by a prophesied World War III, please read my article, What Ezekiel 38-39 Reveals about a Future World War III. For a statistical analysis about the possibility that we have already entered the climactic and final seven-year period that will bring our age to an end, I invite you to read (or re-read) my post about Archbishop Ussher’s calculated chronology of the time from the creation of Adam and Eve until now (tenth link). I wrote that post at a time when there was no coronavirus, no food shortages in America, and our economy was in unprecedented prosperity. As the coronavirus death toll rises, as millions are moving from prosperous jobs to unemployment offices, as food shortages are developing and food lines are springing up all over America, and as the draconian reactions to the coronavirus are moving the world toward a new Depression, that post will have much more applicability today than when I wrote it just last year.
- https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/2020/05/05/hy-vee-limits-meat-purchases-4-per-person/3086164001/
- https://www.dallasnews.com/business/retail/2020/05/05/costco-sams-others-limit-meat-purchases-as-processing-plants-struggle-with-outbreaks/
- https://bringmethenews.com/minnesota-news/coronavirus-some-minnesota-grocery-stores-limiting-meat-purchases
- https://www.news4jax.com/news/2020/05/05/costco-among-stores-limiting-how-much-meat-customers-can-buy/
- https://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/1-in-5-wendys-restaurants-not-offering-beef-analyst-says
- https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-livestock-insight/piglets-aborted-chickens-gassed-as-pandemic-slams-meat-sector-idUSKCN2292YS
- https://www.vox.com/2020/5/4/21243636/meat-packing-plant-supply-chain-animals-killed
- https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8223423/Chinese-owned-Smithfield-Foods-shutters-two-meat-processing-plants-Missouri-Wisconsin.html
- https://www.revealnews.org/article/how-china-purchased-a-prime-cut-of-americas-pork-industry/
- http://stevenmcollins.com/?s=Archbishop+Ussher%27s+chronology
