CAN YOU FEED YOURSELF?
Few people fully realize the precarious nature of our modern food supply. Based on long supply lines, cheap oil, chemical additives and just-in-time logistics, today's food supply is more fragile than you might think. Just one serious disruption -- a nuclear accident, natural disaster, crop disease or GMO catastrophe -- could bring the global food supply crashing down, ending in sky-high food prices coupled with mass starvation in developing nations.
Even without the possibility of disasters, food inflation is on the rise, with wholesale food prices now skyrocketing 30% a year according to the United Nations. And that means food prices are set to double every 2.5 years, making many food staples unaffordable for an increasing number of people.
At the same time all this is happening, global food production is based on a completely unsustainable model of exploiting both freshwater aquifers and cheap fossil fuels. China and India are already issuing urgent warnings about their dwindling water supplies, and in the United States, the Ogallala Aquifer that provides irrigation water across the great expanse of Midwestern farmlands has only a generation of water remaining.
The simple, unavoidable truth of the matter is that food production is headed for collapse in the coming years. No one denies this. The collapse of today's "food bubble" is now apparent. The collapse of food pollinators (honey bees) has already begun, and combined with the threat of GMOs, global seed contamination and accelerating soil erosion, the great food bubble of 1920 - 2012 is headed toward collapse.
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