According to: www.wfp.org- Recent reports, the world is indeed facing a significant global food crisis, with a large number of people experiencing acute food insecurity due to factors like climate change, conflict, and economic shocks, leading to concerns about potential food shortages across various regions; this crisis is particularly impacting vulnerable populations and requires urgent action to address the issue.

The subject of mass food shortages has always been a popular one amongst the prepping community. Regardless of the stated reason for the concern, many a writer has shared their thoughts about what life would be like when the grocery store shelves emptied. Even so, we were all a bit surprised in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the “Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020” began. We were even more surprised when that grew into general shortages, and the stores really did empty out.

I have always thought that the pictures people used showing empty store shelves were faked somehow. But now I have a nice collection of pictures of empty store shelves, all of which I can guarantee you are quite real.

But what’s surprised me more than the stores emptying out is that after two years, things still weren’t back to normal. There’s been one thing after another that kept our supply chain from operating as we are all accustomed to it happening, and to be honest, there doesn’t seem to be any end in sight. If anything, I would say that we can expect the shortages to continue and even get worse.

Before getting into specifics, allow me to say that I would never have thought that one food processing plant going down would really make that much difference. There were a number of food processing plants that shut down during the pandemic, but there was so much going on that it was impossible to see the impact of any one factory. Yet we are now faced with a nationwide shortage of baby formula because of one factory being shut down due to the risk of a bacterial infection.

Granted, that one factory produced about 40% of the baby formula used in this country; but that’s part of the surprise. Even though we’re all used to nationwide brand recognition, I never realized just what that meant from a supply point of view. If the plant producing any one major brand of anything goes down, for whatever reason, it has a wide-reaching impact.

That’s the risk we’re facing right now, and it exists for just about anything you can think of. Many small, local brands are nothing more than national brands that have been packaged for local grocery chains, putting their label on the nationwide brand’s product. So, what we might think of as an alternate source, really isn’t one. That leaves us vulnerable to more shortages.

But just where are these shortages coming from? There are lots of different places, but I’d like to examine just a few.