Farmers are hurting. For the second summer in a row, wheat crops around the globe are being devastated. Farms have been wiped out by droughts in some places and flooding in others.

As a result, prices are about to go through the roof, and supplies will be short this fall.

Texas is withering from its worst drought since 1895, with over 80 percent in “extreme” or “exceptional” drought. This is demolishing the state’s wheat production. It’s only the start of June, and many areas are burnt dry. As one farmer put it, “Wait till August rolls around. Who knows how the place will look.”

Ranchers are sharply reducing their cattle herds, some by 75 percent. In the short term, this means beef prices will drop. But when the cycle turns around, there will be a shortage and prices will skyrocket.

Get ready for the plight of farmers to have global consequences.

America hasn’t had such a bad winter wheat crop since 1996. The government has rated 45 percent of fields as poor or very poor.

Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma produced 28 percent of the total supply of wheat in the United States last year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This year, the usda expects production to drop by 63 percent in Texas, 38 percent in Oklahoma and 27 percent in Kansas.

The National Weather Service estimates that rainfall over the past two months has been less than half of what is normal for these three states. In one area, insurance adjuster David Reed said he’s had 300 farmer claims for drought damage this season, already 10 times more than last year.

“It’s getting to the point where, across a large section of the wheat belt, it’s too late for rain to do any good,” said Mark McMinimy, a Washington-based agribusiness analyst.

And where it is raining, it is flooding. Floods across the South have impacted 3.6 million acres of farmland. The Mississippi floodwaters have wiped out about 10 percent of the nation’s rice crop already.

And it is not just in the U.S. that crops are being hit by the weather.

Europe’s wheat crop is under threat thanks to the driest growing conditions in a generation. The 27 member countries of the European Union are together the world’s largest wheat producer, with the Continent producing one fifth of the world’s output. In the UK, one of the EU’s larger wheat producers, some wheat regions received less than a third of normal rainfall in April.

Meanwhile, floods are impacting potential harvests in Canada. As of May 10, only 3 percent of wheat had been sown, compared to the usual 40 percent at that time. Flooding has also destroyed much of the wheat crop in Australia.

This follows on the heels of last year’s drought in Russia, the worst in half a century, which destroyed a third of its wheat crop and set off a surge in global food prices. That drought, together with floods in Canada, led to a 75 percent rise in wheat prices in a year. And the prices are expected to keep rising. The usda is forecasting a decline in global wheat stockpiles this year for the second year in a row.

Even before the droughts and floods affecting this season’s crops, rising demand and bad weather had already stretched the global food supply chain to the limit. The unrest the Middle East has experienced this year has largely been fueled by rising food prices.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (fao) Food Price Index rose 25 percent last year. In February, it hit a record high. Though stabilizing since then, in April the index was still 36 percent above April 2010. The fao says unfavorable weather conditions are expected to put still more pressure on food prices in the coming months. Oxfam predicts that global prices of staple foods will rise 120 to 180 percent by 2030.

“Things are so tight, if Mother Nature so much as hiccups on adverse weather, it can be unusually bullish for commodities,” said Dan Manternach, a wheat economist with Doane Advisory Services, an agricultural research company in St. Louis.

“[J]ust when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, food prices are about to rocket higher in coming weeks,” writes Ian Cooper, editor of the Wealth Daily investment-advice column. What’s being referred to as a “500-year flood” in the area of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers could cause millions of dollars’ worth of farmland damage, causing corn prices to skyrocket. “All we can do is sit back and watch food prices soar, both across the United States and the globe,” he writes.

World Agricultural Supply and Demand estimates from the usda were already citing big increases in grain costs for the 2011-2012 year over the previous year—and this was before the flooding.

The adverse effects of these trends are far-reaching, and potentially quite serious. The U.S. is the world’s biggest exporter of both wheat and corn. Failing crops in America will impact more than the budgets of U.S. citizens—and exponentially so in many countries. Americans spend less than 10 percent of their income on food. But for the world’s poorest 2 billion people, that figure is 50 to 70 percent. As Foreign Policy brings out, for them, “these soaring [food] prices may mean going from two meals a day to one.”

Rising food prices in the past year have pushed 44 million people into poverty, World Bank President Robert Zoellick estimates.

The ceo of Smithfield Foods, a global food company, said, “We are just one bad weather event away from potentially $10 corn, which once again is another 50 percent increase in the input cost to our live production.” But this is more than just a mere inconvenience. It means that food companies could well go bankrupt, he said.

“We’re descending into a food crisis that’ll ravage the world as we know it,” Cooper says. “Food prices will not come down. We should prepare ourselves now to see food shortages” (emphasis mine).

It’s one thing to have to pay more for food, assuming you have the money. But what if the food isn’t even there?

In Matthew 24, Jesus Christ was asked by His disciples about what signs would precede His Second Coming and the end of this present world. He responded with the pivotal prophecy of His earthly ministry—the Olivet prophecy. Every end-time Bible prophecy revolves around it.

One of the signs Christ told His disciples to look for was that of weather patterns and other natural phenomena taking a violent turn for the worse: “… and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in [different] places” (Matthew 24:7). Jesus told His disciples that His return would be preceded by an uptick in natural disasters.

As editor in chief Gerald Flurry pointed out in a recent Key of David telecast, Jesus told His disciples that famine—a shortage of food and water—and then pestilences, or disease epidemics, would accompany these natural disasters.

Droughts and floods on the scale of which we are beginning to see today have a tremendous impact on food production! The Greek word for famines can mean “a scarcity of harvest.” This is exactly what is filling our headlines today.

Christ’s words recall this chilling prophecy from Isaiah: “For behold, the Lord, the Lord of hosts, takes away from Jerusalem [a type of all the end-time nations of Israel] and from Judah the stock and the store,the whole supply of bread and the whole supply of water” (Isaiah 3:1; New King James Version). God says that because of our sins, He is going to take away our food and water!

In Hosea, another end-time book, God indicts the nations of Israel with this charge: “For she did not know that I gave her corn, and wine, and oil, and multiplied her silver and gold, which they prepared for Baal” (Hosea 2:8). We have forgotten that we owe thanks for our abundance to God! He has given us the greatest blessings any nation in human history has ever received—and we have turned our backs on Him. He continues, “Therefore will I return, and take away my corn in the time thereof, and my wine in the season thereof, and will recover my wool and my flax given to cover her nakedness” (verse 9).

We need to expect weather disasters to cause famines! God warned us through His prophets—and even Christ Himself!

We are about to experience far worse problems than just rising grocery bills. But as we do, remember what they point to. This was one of the signs Christ gave that He was about to return to this weary Earth!