Writing in today’s Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard claims that the energy crisis which has worsened due to the war in Ukraine, could ultimately lead to food rationing in the UK.
Evans-Pritchard points out that the supply of grain was already squeezed before Russia invaded Ukraine. He writes:
The world faces what amounts to a commodity “black swan” across the gamut of primary resources. Oil, gas, coal, and the “ags” are all spiraling higher together, with metals catching up fast. It is a systemic stagflation shock, an intractable problem for central bankers.
It acts like a war reparations tax on the economies of importing nations and is ultimately contractionary.
Unlike the West, China is prepared.
It has been stocking up for months and currently holds 84pc of the world’s copper reserve, 70pc of its corn, and 51pc of its wheat.
“China has bought enormous quantities of US soy in recent weeks,” said Rabobank. One might ask if Xi Jinping knew something in advance.
Record food commodity prices are an ordeal by fire for some 45 poorer countries that rely heavily on food imports: the Maghreb, the non-oil Middle East, swaths of Africa, Bangladesh, or Afghanistan.
The World Food Programme warned of “catastrophic” scarcity for several hundred million people last November. The picture is worse today.
“Everything is going up vertically.
The whole production chain for food is under pressure from every side,” said Abdolreza Abbassian, the ex-head of agro-markets at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation.
“I have never seen anything like it in 30 years and I fear that prices are going to go much higher in the 2022-2023 season. The situation is just awful and at some point people are going to realise what may be coming. We’re all going to have to tighten our belts, and the mood could get very nasty even in OECD countries like Britain,” he said.
Evans-Pritchard goes on to point out that one third of the world’s barley exports come from Russia and Ukraine. Also, 29 per cent of wheat, 19 percent of Maize and 80 per cent of sunflower oil comes from the two countries.
The financial services company Rabobank has warned that the supply problem will worsen significantly if Ukrainian farmers don’t plant significant quantities of corn next month.
Of course, here in the UK, there is a solution to this. In theory, we are no longer a member of the European Union. The UK isn’t constrained by the shackles of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).
The CAP was set up to ensure Europe’s food supply. That was the claim in any case. In reality, it was set up to gradually decrease farming in Europe, to tackle climate change and to preserve rural areas and landscapes. Climate change is the greatest hoax in human history.
The CAP is a mainstay of Agenda 2030. It’s real purpose is to move people out of rural (and coastal areas) and into smart cities or human settlement zones.
There is no reason for the UK (or Ireland for that matter) to fear a grain shortage. We have the most fertile lands in the world and the perfect climate to grow all we need and then some. We’d be putting tens of thousands of people to work in healthy and sustainable jobs too.
Naturally, this won’t happen. The UK hasn’t really left the EU and Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer dance to the same tune as Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the EU Commission.
Food shortages leading to food rationing is an inevitability. Will that be the red line for those who blindly obeyed their governments during the Covid scam?
I doubt it.
