(The Economic Collapse Blog)—Is there something that they aren’t telling us? All of a sudden, governments all over the globe are instructing their citizens to stockpile food, water and other essential supplies. Why is there such a sense of urgency to do this in late 2026? What has changed? Without a doubt, conditions are far different than they were 12 months ago.
It appears that the war with Iran will soon greatly escalate, the war in Ukraine just continues to intensify, a Super El Niño is causing global weather patterns to go nuts, European cities are being ravaged by seemingly endless riots, and we are simultaneously facing a global energy crisis, a global fertilizer crisis and a global food crisis. Chaos is erupting all around us, and the months ahead are almost certainly going to be even more chaotic.
But does this explain why governments throughout the world have suddenly decided that now is the time for everyone to go out and buy emergency supplies?
In the UK, the BBC just published a very long article that reveals details about their “Black Sky” doomsday plan…
In a major emergency, we are being told to hunker down and turn on an FM radio, as thousands did in Lancaster. This is why the BBC has its own Black Sky plan.
Only a small number of staff know the full details, but from what I have gleaned, about 100 people in the BBC will run a special emergency radio studio.
It will have secure lines of communication not dependent on the internet, and fuel, water and food to ensure it can operate without resupply for at least three days.
What kind of scenario are they anticipating that would make this “Black Sky” doomsday plan necessary?
Apparently it would include a loss of power and Internet, because they are planning to use radio transmission towers to keep the British public informed over FM radio…
The BBC’s broadcasts will be sent via radio transmission towers, isolated from the internet and equipped with tanks of between five and 40,000 litres (8,800 gallons) of diesel to keep their generators going for three days – FM radio is power hungry. The teams will be using satellite phones to keep in touch and if these stop working there are pre-agreed protocols and meet-up points.
Why FM? Because it works almost everywhere, even in a blackout or a crippling cyber-attack.
This “Black Sky” doomsday plan was revealed less than a month after the UK government’s “Be Ready” campaign was launched.
Starting on October 22nd, the UK government began instructing citizens to stockpile food, water and other emergency supplies…
The government’s new Be Ready campaign is advising the public to stock up on three day’s worth of supplies for use during severe weather or cyber-attacks, so help can be directed to the most vulnerable first.
In a concise, two-page document, it suggests people stock bottled water and non-perishable food for three days, a torch with spare batteries, a wind-up FM radio, a first aid kit and a copy of their passport. To stave off panic buying, it advises people to check their cupboards first and build up items gradually on regular shopping trips.
Apparently the “Be Ready” campaign has been very successful.
A co-owner of a prepping store in the UK was absolutely astounded by the number of orders that started coming in…
While there is no evidence the advice has triggered mass panic, the public is clearly responding. Jack Brown, who co-owns Sgt Prepper Shop, which stocks emergency food and survival tools, said he received a month’s worth of orders in the first 24 hours of the Be Ready campaign.
“I thought my phone was glitching or being hacked with the number of orders coming in,” he said.
I think that this is wonderful.
But what has prompted this dramatic change of tone by officials in the UK?
Are they concerned that cyberattacks could take down the power grid or the financial system?
In France, hackers just broke into a prominent bank and successfully got away with 133 million dollars…
French cooperative bank Crédit Mutuel Arkéa was targeted in a cyberattack that enabled fraudulent transactions of up to $133 million, forcing it to respond by suspending certain systems.
The bank says that the attacker used its own account to initiate transactions to other banking organizations, but customer assets remain unaffected.
Crédit Mutuel Arkéa is a major French banking group with more than 5.8 million members and 211.5 billion euros in assets.
Our financial institutions are under constant attack, and artificial intelligence is giving hackers more powerful tools that we have ever seen before.
Without a doubt, that is a very serious threat.
There is also the possibility that the war in the Middle East could soon get very serious.
If they are attacked, the Iranians have warned that they could actually start cutting undersea Internet cables, and apparently they are quite serious about this threat…
Ships linked to Iran looped, loitered and went dark over undersea internet cables in the Gulf of Oman in the weeks after Tehran threatened the region’s digital infrastructure, the Financial Times reported on Friday. One of them had been boarded by US Marines in May.
At least four vessels tracked by the maritime analytics firm Windward took unusual routes and lingered over cable corridors off Oman in October, the FT said. Three were tankers under US sanctions. The fourth was a small Iranian fishing boat with no known owner.
The ships sailed normally “until they reached a specific cable corridor, and only then slowed, looped, turned back, loitered or went dark,” Windward told the newspaper. That behavior “fits the profile of mapping the cable routes, or placing charges or mines on them while dark,” it said.
If Iran starts cutting undersea Internet cables, that could have serious implications for the entire global financial system.
Meanwhile, the war between Russia and Ukraine has reached a very dangerous stage, and there is a very real possibility that NATO could get directly involved.
Ominously, a major British news source has just published a very alarming article entitled “‘Every single Brit’ must prepare for WW3 conscription as major warning issued“…
Brits could face being called up to fight in a potential World War Three, with the “whole of the nation” warned to brace for conscription within six years. Security and intelligence expert Professor Anthony Glees delivered the stark warning amid growing concerns that Britain could become entangled in a wider conflict with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
The University of Buckingham academic stated the “whole of the nation” should be prepared for the prospect of conscription, while urging the Government to begin recruiting volunteers.
Professor Glees said: “The UK Government should plan to sign up volunteers now and over the next three years and ‘the whole of the nation’ should prepare for conscription within six years unless Putin were defeated.”
Sadly, the truth is that we are in the midst of World War III right now, but most people are not calling it that yet.
War, famine, pestilence, cyberattacks, financial chaos and historic natural disasters are all in our future.
So it certainly makes sense to stockpile food, water and emergency supplies.
But I have a feeling that there is something that they aren’t telling us.
I don’t think that it is just a coincidence that governments all over the planet are suddenly telling their citizens to prepare for doomsday.
We live in such perilous times, and I am convinced that 2027 is going to be even more chaotic than 2026 has been.
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
