Whatever happened to the wheat mountains, the great surpluses of butter, dairy and plenteous agricultural products once stockpiled in North America, the British dominions and Europe? We do not hear of huge surpluses in food production anymore, of massive stockpiled reserves for shipment to countries in famine, or as a hedge against times of extreme weather or blight by disease.

Those days are over. The days of plenty are a thing of the past.

Prepare now for increasing shortages of staple food products.

Twelve years ago, the Trumpet’s editor in chief had this to say about the prospect of a national food shortage occurring in America (emphasis mine):

In 1994, a Washington-based research group warned of a potential national food shortage and its consequences by or before 2030. But figure in the increasing occurrences of floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, drought and other unnatural disasters and it is sure to occur much sooner than predicted. Jeremiah attempted to describe this unparalleled moment: “Alas! for that day is great, so that none is like it: it is even the time of Jacob’s trouble; but he shall be saved out of it” (Jeremiah 30:7).

With food as our largest export product, the United States stands to lose the most in any trade war if any “natural” or unnatural disasters should cause us to have a bad year. National reserves for our own needs, in case of just such an emergency, are very small and would barely last long enough to get us through to the next growing season. Who would help us, the greatest humanitarian nation ever, should we have a crisis?

Who indeed, with the U.S. having become the second-most hated nation in the world, next to tiny, embattled Israel!

Just what are the facts relating to worldwide food production? The reality is that a number of historical leaders in agricultural exports are now becoming net importers of food products.

A peek at the stock market reaction to investment in basic staple-diet products tells the story. Global agricultural commodity markets are experiencing a roller-coaster ride, with supplies in descent and prices on the rise. The price of corn has shot through the roof due to a combination of bad weather and increasing demand for the crop from the growing ethanol industry. Wheat prices are also escalating. Demand is rapidly overtaking supply in our grain markets.

Bread prices shot up 8 pence a loaf in one day early this month in Britain as drought continued to ravage major grain producers such as Australia, adverse weather continued to blight North American producers and buyers dramatically hiked demand—in India’s case by 50 percent—over what suppliers are presently offering. The price of wheat has escalated 54 percent in just three months and shows no sign of a slowdown. In the global grain-growing industry, land devoted to cultivating wheat and barley has been declining for the past 25 years. As the Telegraph recently observed, “The soaring price of wheat is not an isolated phenomenon. All around the agricultural markets prices are rising. Corn doubled last year, while the price of soybeans is more than 50 percent higher than it was 12 months ago” (September 6).

On top of all that, the dairy industry is teetering on the brink of disaster in countries that not only lost prime breeding stock due to foot-and-mouth disease, but also lost production due to adverse weather upheavals in a number of primary producing nations. Australia’s dairy products exports have significantly dropped over the past two years as a result of its worst drought in a century.

To add to the emerging global agricultural crisis, not only have prices escalated in First World countries, but food aid to less-developed nations is being curtailed. The British Housewives League commented, “Food aid programs for children in Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines and Algeria are likely to be reduced, because of rising costs” (Lantern, July). It’s not only donor fatigue that is harming the world food aid effort; it’s the failure of those nations who have given the most aid in the past to maintain their usual production levels.

The Telegraph aligns with Gerald Flurry’s prescient comments of 12 years ago (and the Prophet Jeremiah’s of 2,500 years earlier): “If food prices are really on the move again, history suggests we should be worried” (op. cit.).

The problem this globe now faces is that not only is most of its arable land already under production, but 35 percent of that land is seriously degraded due to the intensive chemically based farming practices fashionable since World War ii. Add to this the increasing dependence of the farm sector on hybrid varieties that have no capacity to self-replenish (courtesy of the rapacious designs of such corporate entities as Monsanto Chemicals) plus the continuing escalation of energy prices, and you have a recipe for agricultural disaster.

Simply put, we are about to reap the whirlwind as a result of ignorance and greed practiced by our agriculture industries over the past 60 years.

Add to this the increasing flight from the dollar, with China potentially cashing in U.S. bonds; oil contracts, traditionally concluded in dollars, now increasingly being written in euros, rubles and yen; the U.S. subprime lending market crash—and the writing is on the wall for those with the courage to admit reality. The world’s systems of agriculture and commerce stand on the brink of disaster.

For the greater part of the 20th century, Herbert W. Armstrong warned of the very state that the world—in particular the English-speaking nations—has now entered. Fifty years ago, he declared:

I repeat—it’s later than you think!

Yes, time is running out on us, fast, and we’re too sound asleep in deception to realize it!

Our peoples will continue only a few more years in comparative economic prosperity. This very prosperity is our fatal curse! Because our people are setting their hearts on it, seeking ease and leisure, becoming soft and decadent and weak!

We’re going the way of ancient rome—to a greater fall, because we’re bigger and more prosperous, and have farther to fall!

Then, suddenly, before we realize it, we’ll find ourselves in the throes of famine, and uncontrollable epidemics of disease. Already we’re in the beginning of a terrible famine and we don’t know it—a famine of needed minerals and vitamins in our foods. Our peoples have ignored God’s agricultural laws. Not all the land has been permitted to rest every seventh year. The land has been overworked. Today, the soil is worn out. And food factories, in the interest of larger profits, are removing much of what minerals and vitamins remain—while a new profit-making vitamin industry deludes the people into believing they can obtain these precious elements from pills and capsules purchased in drug stores and “health food” stores!

And all this state of affairs because man is in defiance of his Maker!

The fact is, until man gets it right with his Maker, the troubling signs that we see impacting humanity are, increasingly, week by week, only going to accelerate into untold disaster of global proportions. The sure word of biblical prophecy guarantees that. And that word is much more sure than the word of any human “expert” or commentator on today’s scene!

If ever there was a need for you to seek and find the solution to these accelerating woes of humanity, surely it is now, before it becomes too late for you to do anything about it.

Request your own copy, gratis, of our booklet The Wonderful World Tomorrow, and learn about the only true hope mankind has for becoming part of the solution, rather than remaining a large part of the cause for its own increasing sufferings.