Yes, you read that right.  Food shortages.  In the United States.  We were once the most prosperous nation on the planet, and now we may be facing food shortages.  Excerpt:

Farmers and ranchers across the country are struggling with spiking production costs. From diesel fuel to fertilizer, everything they need to produce crops is much more expensive, and farmers are warning that food shortages and even higher prices are on the horizon.

“Right now we are in a crisis in America as it relates to farmers,” John Boyd, Jr., of the National Black Farmers Association, told Sean Hannity on Fox News. “We are facing an all-time high in diesel fuel.”

Americans are feeling the pinch of gas prices and the rising costs of essential goods like food and other necessities.

Inflation is at a 40-year high, and farming is one industry that’s being hit especially hard. The higher costs of farming will further impact the food supply over the next few months, and even years, since crops take time to plant, grow and harvest.

Fuel and fertilizer are costing farmers more money. The national average for diesel fuel is $5.81 per gallon, but a year ago, that was only $3.23. This means a farmer is now up to about $870 to fill a tractor with a 150 gallon gas tank – much more than last year’s price of $484.

Adding to the high costs are supply chain problems. Russia is the largest exporter of fertilizer, and many of the natural resources needed to make the product come from Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, so the conflict in that region has increased costs and made supplies more challenging to come by.

An April report from Barron’s noted that the costs of certain fertilizer ingredients have almost doubled since last year. Some farmers are concerned that the costs of inputs could rise as much as 40% this year and another 20% or higher into 2023.

Upshot of all this is simple:  What food you will be able to buy will be more expensive.  I’m sure glad we have plenty of edible critters hereabouts.

So, my advice to all True Believers is simple:  Stock up, to what extent you can.  If you have a big freezer and can afford to fill it (or even run it) do so.  Ours will being filled up with fish and game this summer and fall.  If you have a Costco or Sam’s Club membership, bulk rice and beans, sealed in food-grade containers, will last a long time.  If you have room, till up a garden plot.

After WW2, my grandma, tired of running a big vegetable garden during the Depression and then a Victory garden during the war, announced that henceforth she would buy vegetables at the grocery and would grow only flowers, which she did, for the rest of her life.  It’s kind of sad, now, that much of the country may be running those small-plot gardens again, just to get enough to eat.  I hope it doesn’t get that bad – but given the current crop of nitwits, buncombe artists, grifters and nincompoops in the Imperial City just now, I’m afraid it might.

This just in concerning the famous Stalinist state ruled by a stunted gargoyle with bad hair from a long line of stunted gargoyles with bad hair (and no, I’m not talking about Chicago.)  North Korea is in the throes of another (predictable) famine.  Excerpt:

Someone needs to get ahold of North Korea’s leaders and bring them to an American grocery store. That country closed its border with China — also communist of course — during COVID and is now deep in the throes of famine. Maybe this explains even Kim’s mysterious weight loss.

North Korea is ordering citizens to start producing their own food to prepare for a long-term food shortage that could last for three years, but ordinary people say that the government is shirking its responsibility, sources in the country told RFA.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimated in a recent report that North Korea would be short about 860,000 tons of food this year, about two months of normal demand.

RFA reported in April that authorities were warning residents to prepare for economic difficulties as bad as the 1994-1998 famine which killed millions by some estimates, but experts said that the situation was dire, but nothing like the 1990s.

The U.S. and many western countries experienced temporary supply chain issues as consequences of the COVID lockdowns, but we have rebounded. We’re dealing with inflation but not starvation. On most days the shelves on our grocery stores are full and we can get anything we can afford. Even our so-called “food deserts” aren’t so disastrous that the government is telling people to start growing our own food or we’ll starve.

It doesn’t have to be the way it is in North Korea. Communism is to blame, first and last. It doesn’t work, it never has, and it never will. North Korea’s cousins to the south are struggling through another round of COVID but they’re capitalist. They’re not starving.

But they will be.

There’s no good way out of this for the North Korean people.  They are starved, uneducated, ill-used, and disarmed.  China won’t intervene.  South Korea isn’t too interested in taking on the Nork military, who will probably start slinging NBC weapons around wildly.

And if the regime topples from within – well, desperate madmen with nukes, what could possibly go wrong?

I’m guessing here, but I’d say the next ten years will tell the tale.