Let me first say that I hate the word “polycrisis.” Unfortunately, it has been adopted by far too many, especially globalists, as the term characterizing the multiple existential threats facing our nation and the world today. I used the word in the headline so that hopefully those searching for it will come across this article and its anti-globalist message.
An article over at WND caught my attention earlier today. It detailed the massive threat the fertilizer shortage presented and highlighted how the United States is vulnerable just like so many third-world nations today. But at the end was a surprising gem. The Biden-Harris regime is offering grants for domestic companies to ramp up fertilizer production here at home.
While I’m not fan of grants, this may be the one out of a hundred that I can actually support. If we’re able to survive the so-called polycrisis, then I hope the lesson we learn as a nation is that we need to bring as much production of crucial goods and resources home. We cannot move forward in this volatile world with dependency on any other nation. Today, we depend on China for rare earths, pharmaceutical ingredients, and a slew of other important items. Obviously, we rely on Russia for fertilizer. We rely on anyone who’s selling oil for something that we should be producing at home. It’s a joke and we’re quickly becoming the punchline.
There was a time not too long ago when the phrase “American Made” was embraced by both the right and the left. Today, it’s been practically abandoned by both sides of the political aisle, particularly the left, as we seem too accepting of imports. That needs to change. As we suffer through these existential threats, let’s strive to change the status of our nation into a a net-exporter as we once were. I talked about this on today’s premium episode of The JD Rucker Show. If you haven’t already, sign up for Red Voice Media premium to get this and other shows from fabulous hosts, and be sure to use promo code “JDR” at checkout.
Here’s the article by Bob Unruh from WND:
World’s Food Security in Peril as Russia, China Have Stranglehold on Key Item
The world relies for most of the fertilizers used to promote crops on Russia and its ally Belarus, and China.
And that has alarms going off because of the stranglehold that could give those nations over the world’s food.
A report that was posted on the Yahoo site explains, “Just as semiconductors have become a lightning rod for geopolitical friction, so the race for fertilizers has alerted the U.S. and its allies to a strategic dependency for an agricultural input that is a key determinant of food security.”
The report cites a “cargo” that was trapped in Rotterdam that was so precious the U.N. intervened to get it moved to Mozambique. It was tons of fertilizer destined overland for Malawi.
“About 20% of Malawi’s population is projected to face acute food insecurity during the ‘lean season’ through March, making the use of fertilizers to grow crops all the more vital. It’s one of 48 nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America identified by the International Monetary Fund as most at risk from the shock to food and fertilizer costs fanned by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. One year on, the upheaval caused to world fertilizer markets is seen by the U.N. as a key risk to food availability in 2023,” the report explained.
The report explained that it is who controls fertilizers that is moved “to the forefront of the political agenda.”
“The role of fertilizer is as important as the role of seed in the country’s food security,” Udai Shanker Awasthi, managing director and chief executive officer of the Indian Farmers Fertilizer Cooperative, said in the report.
“If your stomach is full then you can defend your house, you can defend your borders, you can defend your economy.”
The issue for the $250 billion global fertilizer industry was complicated last year because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Ports were disrupted, shipping, banking and insurance are more complicated, meaning ordinary deliveries haven’t been reliable.
Andrey Melnichenko, of EuroChem, a billion dollar fertilizer company, blames the sanctions by the European Union, but there also have been those who have been stockpiling the products since prices are spiking.
“The situation is exacerbated by sanctions on potash giant Belarus alongside the decision by China, a major producer of nitrogen and phosphate fertilizers, to impose restrictions on exports to protect domestic supply, curbs that analysts don’t see being lifted until the middle of 2023 at the earliest,” the report said.
Experts are estimating a 20% drop in food production because of the fertilizer industry issues.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden is delivering $500 million in grants to companies to try to persuade increased production in the United States.
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Bypass Big Tech Censors
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.
