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https://www.globalresearch.ca/imf-now-warning-food-supply-shortages-will-create-waves-social-unrest-across-globe/5778326

IMF Now Warning that Food Supply Shortages Will Create Waves of Social Unrest Across the Globe

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has issued a warning about the future, which looks grim.

If things continue as they are now – and they more than likely will – global food shortages will continue. The result will be supply issues and civil unrest, likely beginning in the Third World and spreading from there.

Protests have already erupted in Peru due to unrelenting inflation, and this is probably only a taste of what is to come as the problem spreads.

Sky-high food prices, especially in poorer countries, will make it unaffordable for many families to make ends meet. This will lead to protests and riots – and as the dominoes continue to fall throughout the rest of the world, hell on earth will ensue.

“This crisis unfolds even as the global economy has not yet fully recovered from the pandemic,” says Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, the IMF’s research development director.

In a post he wrote, Gourinchas blamed a mix of high inflation and supply problems for the unfolding disaster that the world is witnessing. The most vulnerable countries, he added, will experience the fallout first, followed eventually by the rest of the world.

“Even before the war, inflation in many countries had been rising due to supply-demand imbalances and policy support during the pandemic, prompting a tightening of monetary policy,” Gourinchas added.

“In this context, beyond its immediate and tragic humanitarian impact, the war will slow economic growth and increase inflation.”

Will the entire world go hungry?

Gourinchas went on to talk about how increases in both food and fuel prices are likely to spur even more social unrest, starting in poorer countries. Central banks, he says, will have to adjust their policies somehow to try to anchor both medium- and long-term inflation expectations.

If they fail at this – and they eventually will, since central banking is a Ponzi scheme that cannot persist forever without eventually collapsing under its own weight – then the situation will spiral even more out of control.

Even if central banks can get a hold on inflation somehow, food shortages are likely to persist for years to come, Gourinchas further suggests. Countries like China are now hoarding food, while “breadbasket” countries like Ukraine are no longer exporting and not planting nearly as many acres as usual due to the war.

It is a perfect storm, you might say, that seems to have taken out the global economy already. The full fallout has just not manifested yet in its entirety.

It was the IMF, just to clarify, that used the words hell on earth in an earlier report to describe what it sees coming on the horizon.

“Failure to provide this year a few extra billion dollars means you’re going to have famine, destabilization, and mass migration,” says ex-Republican Gov. David Beasley, who now heads up the World Food Bank.

“If you think we’ve got Hell on earth now, you just get ready. If we neglect northern Africa, northern Africa’s coming to Europe. If we neglect the Middle East, [the] Middle East is coming to Europe.”

This almost reads like a threat, which is probably what it is. Give us more money, Beasley is basically saying, or else.

The Western world will not be immune to this, by the way. On top of the inflation we are already seeing, the fertilizer crisis alone will reduce crop yields, theoretically collapsing our food supply by up to one half of normal.

In Ireland, officials are already encouraging their farmers to plant extra grain crops over the coming year in anticipation of this squeeze. In Scotland, however, there appears to be a lot of denial as to the severity of the situation.

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https://www.oftwominds.com/blogapr22/abyss4-22.html

Staring Into the Abyss

The global economy is perched on the edge of an abyss, and averting our gaze doesn't actually lessen the risk, it increases it because problems which aren't faced directly and addressed directly fester and rot the system from within.

This is why we're collectively staring into the abyss: all the big problems have been dismissed, ignored or papered over with PR-happy-talk "solutions" that only make the problem worse. There are three basic techniques that our "leadership" (public and private) have used to avoid dealing directly with our pressing problems:

1. Appear to address the problems by doing more of what's failed spectacularly.

2. Propose magical-thinking happy-happy technological "solutions" that are appealing but impractical.

3. Keep the status quo glued together to maximize quick-buck gains for the elite while guaranteeing long-term catastrophe for the entire society / economy.

Doing more of what's failed spectacularly is one of the phrases you've seen here over the years. This generates an illusion of control because the tried-and-true Band-Aid makes it look like the problem is being addressed. Since doing more of what's failed spectacularly doesn't break the system immediately, everyone incorrectly assumes it's benign or actually helping.

The Federal Reserve's blowing of serial speculative credit-asset bubbles is a good example. With the bogus goal of generating a "wealth effect" that only rewards the already-rich, the Fed has exacerbated socially fatal neofeudal inequality and created guaranteed-to-pop bubbles that each collapsed with devastating consequences for the credulous who believed the Fed's poisonous assurances that a) this isn't a bubble and b) bubbles never pop.

The Fed's "solution"--blowing an even bigger bubble to paper over the catastrophic losses when the previous bubble popped--has finally reached the endgame: three bubbles and you're out (2000, 2008-09 and 2021-22). Sorry to disappoint the beneficiaries of the three Fed bubbles, but there won't be a fourth bubble. Bubbles don't inflate at the bottom of the abyss.

Magical thinking abounds in finance, energy and and economic policy. Examples include substituting nuclear power for hydrocarbons, conveniently sidestepping the reality that we'd need to build a new reactor a week for years to make a difference, and the really inconvenient reality that the U.S. has built a grand total of two new reactors in the past 25 years and the world has a few dozen under construction--a scale roughly 1/100th of what's needed.

In finance, magical thinking appears across the entire spectrum from the fanciful delusions of Modern Monetary Theory (we can't go broke because we can always print more money--uh, sure, that will work just fine, guaranteed) to the Fed's "if we just make the already-rich even richer while bankrupting the bottom 90%, everything will work out just peachy." Peachy for whom? That question is never answered because the billionaires are so charmingly bashful.

The New Nobility elites reckon that if they can keep the crumbling cliff edge from collapsing for a few more years, they can maximize their private gains and then escape to their New Zealand bunkers when the consequences of their plunder send the global economy into the abyss.

The elites are in effect selling seats in the Titanic's lifeboats to the highest bidders. The ship is doomed and they see this tragedy as a terrifically profitable opportunity.

Another analogy is polluting your nation and people so a handful of industrialists and party hacks can get super-rich. The land, water and air are all poisoned and the people sick and dying, but who cares once you're secure in your fortified villa?

None of humanity's most pressing problems have been addressed by any elite, any where. So sorry, but "you'll own nothing and be miserable--oops, we mean happy, yes, deliriously happy" doesn't count as a solution.

Every elite is pursuing the same self-serving agenda of maximizing their private plunder and hoping--perhaps vainly--to escape the consequences of their obsession with short-term gains at the expense of the planet and its people.

Watch your step while peering into the abyss. The cliff edge is crumbling faster than we realize.