Food shock is inevitable due to the Iran war – and it could get bad
Posted by relianceschool@reddit | collapse | View on Reddit | 71 comments
No matter where you get your food from, a good chunk of your diet is ultimately reliant on fossil fuels. We already need to change this to tackle climate change, but the Iran war and resulting oil shortage is showing the urgent need to rethink food.
Even if the conflict in the Middle East ends today, higher fuel, fertilizer and pesticide prices will lead to a food shock in the coming months. There is no easy way out, but accelerating the net-zero transition will help prevent future shocks.
Paywall-free link: https://archive.is/Ttw9Y
Physical_Ad5702@reddit
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but “net-zero transition” isn’t happening.
Skrudrak@reddit
Ohh, it will happen....taps head
ansibleloop@reddit
No no net zero is totally possible
It just relies on tech that can only extract 1 megaton of CO2 per year per carbon capture plant
We only need to remove 1 trillion tons, so we only need 1 million of these plants worldwide
Also we have to build and power them without using fossil fuels
Oh and we don't even have 25 years to do this
uninhabited@reddit
lol and we don't have the engineers, techs, contractors, steel or energy to build a million of these. Even if we blew up all the AI and crypto datacentres we still don't have enough energy
arthousepsycho@reddit
It’s also just one of many things thrown about to put the responsibility on the public as the cause of the issues, when we are a speck of the issue when looking at the whole. Just like “carbon footprint”.
Trumpton2023@reddit
imalostkitty-ox0@reddit
This is the net zero transition ☠️☠️☠️☠️
Bluest_waters@reddit
This is it! Saint Donald Trump is going to make gas so expensive because of his disastrous war, that people will be forced to transition to renewable energy. What a guy!
fratticus_maximus@reddit
1, He's put tariffs on the country with the most wanton consumption: the US; thus reducing consumption ... at least theoretically.
2, He deports people from said country where the CO2 footprint of each citizen is much higher than that of the countries he's deporting to.
3, His actions vis a vis the Iran war has, according to France, destroyed 30-40% of the oil and gas infrastructure in the ME. I believe this accounts for roughly 10% of the Oil and Gas consumption in the world. This may literally force people to transition more readily into renewables.
Move over Greta Thunberg. We have a new climate hero in charge.
imalostkitty-ox0@reddit
Kiiiiiind of. It’s more like people will have to choose to stop eating food and drinking water, things of that nature
SweetAlyssumm@reddit
That very phrase always makes me laugh. In a not-funny way.
almodsz@reddit
Maybe not voluntarily, but it will happen eventually. Mother Nature might be the one who implements it, though.
Konradleijon@reddit
It’s been like this for a while
leisurechef@reddit
Everyone is laser focused on gas prices & totally missing this right now, just bonkers
Swimming-Comedian500@reddit
What would you say are the best things to stock up on right now?
leisurechef@reddit
Tinned food, pasta & rice
ommnian@reddit
Idk, I feel like the last week or two I've been hearing more and more about food. I am definitely planning on a big garden.
sharksnack3264@reddit
Just got a chest freezer. Thankfully my pantry is pretty well stocked with dry goods already.
ommnian@reddit
Drought the last couple of years is what drove us to put in rain water cisterns. Now we can water without worrying about our well.
ZeroAnimated@reddit
Hopefully it rains
ommnian@reddit
It certainly has been. They're full now.
Radiomaster138@reddit
How much land that you don’t lamb
ommnian@reddit
Huh?
snertwith2ls@reddit
Living in Hawaii. We get about 85% of our food from elsewhere. This has been a fact forever. They've discussed it forever and still we're screwed.
existing_for_fun@reddit
Not everyone
I stocked up on pantry goods and other essentials. I've got 60 days of food in storage that I can cook. I can split it with shopping and do every other meal to keep costs down. That will buy me... 4 months. Not great, but I'm continuing to grow my stored food.
I live in an apartment (2 BR) so space is limited, but it's not impossible.
I have a deep freezer I keep on the back patio (it's covered and out of the weather) and I have some shelves inside I use.
strolls@reddit
I bought quite a lot of lentils and rice too, but I don't think actual shortages will be the problem (in the developed world), we're just going to see higher prices over the coming years.
existing_for_fun@reddit
Right. That's why I bought now. Hopefully I can ease the financial pain as the prices rise over the next year or so.
litreofstarlight@reddit
If you've got room under the bed, you can stash cans etc there too.
darkpsychicenergy@reddit
It was only like, last week some people tried posting about it but it was labeled Ruzzian propaganda.
Darkest_Elemental@reddit
Some are simply dismissing this will have lasting effects. I have been noticing climbing prices week by week in the grocery store. I keep trying to warn those around me to start buying extra non perishables and other goods but everyone is saying the oil situation and gas prices wont be like this for long. I cant tell how or why they see it this way.
I see the trickle down already of the cost of fuel/transportation is being offloaded on the consumers.
People like me on already tight margins are noticing the pinch more than those who can tap away their grocery bills without having to take a concern with the additional cost.
The items I can afford as it is this week, will be that much more unaffordable next week as prices continue to creep up.
hevnztrash@reddit
I have been primarily concerned about this. I don’t own a car and bicycle everywhere. Food prices and availability is where this will hit me HARD.
Bluest_waters@reddit
How does food get to our grocery stores? Via trucks that burn diesel fuel
SeVenMadRaBBits@reddit
Fox and Facebook haven't told them to focus on it yet
rematar@reddit
will this affect me
will be the end of us all
i am recording
night_rain7@reddit
I’ve most certainly being paying attention. I’m in interior Alaska and food prices are already so high.
I was planning to cut back on my garden this year and give myself a break. I have a very large garden and I grew a ton of food last year (300lbs of potatoes for example. We’re still eating food from last year’s garden.) but by the end of the season my body was done (autoimmune disease). My hands were so bad. My plan was to just focus on myself and enjoying the outdoors this year and do a minimal garden of only direct sow crops, winter squash and potatoes. But nope. I’ve planned out another really large growing year. I also lucked into 75 bales of free straw for expanding my beds so I can grow even more. Thankfully I know how to pressure can, water bath can, dehydrate foods, etc. We also have a smoker so if we get a moose this year I plan to do moose jerky in addition to canning and freezing it. I hatch chicks every year and sell most as straight run but out of those I keep and grow out I usually give away the roosters to others to eat as I hate killing them, but this year I’m keeping them for us. I was also planning to take a break from goat milking but it’s looking like I’ll be breeding my does this summer for winter milking. Summers are too crazy for me so I like to start milking in the fall through spring then take a break for the hectic summer.
PrairieFire_withwind@reddit
I would recommend carol deppe's books.
She is a plant breeder, phd in biology and brilliant.
Ahe gardens for her food and i thinknit is her breed your own vegetable varieties book that goes into it (gotta skim as i have multiple of her books) but she goes through her process of finding the veggies that are the least work on her body for the most balanced and full diet.
She has some health issues she works around so this is real world knowledge and experience on top of harvard biology training. Well worth the read. Maybe you can adapt some of her ideas to your needs to help save your body.
Beardygrandma@reddit
Any bored retired local or something you trust enough to just give you a hand in exchange for some of the yielded food? You do lighter more enjoyable work, and get someone who wants to help, to help?
XavierRussell@reddit
You've gotta get yourself a farm hand! (Probably easier said than done in Alaska of course).
I helped out on a personal garden/farm during my last couple years of highschool, and I learned so much. I think my experiences there were probably more valuable even than the work/effort I was saving the people who I was helping out.
So might be a win-win if you can find the right person.
loralailoralai@reddit
Maybe in your country but food inflation is huge here, and our ‘gas’ prices are way higher than yours. Everything is going to go up and shortages.
Your media sucks to put it bluntly
Some_Ear_8539@reddit
Where you at
ArugulaAcrobatic4018@reddit
Plants are already in the ground and the fields are fertilized.
Overheaddrop080@reddit
Maybe but farmers still need fuel to maintain, spray, and pick. Then fuel is used to move the food to where people live. And then, in car society, people use fuel to go pick up or order their food.
0o0xXx0o0@reddit
Thanks Israel.
loralailoralai@reddit
And trump. Mostly trump
RueTabegga@reddit
Don’t leave Putin and the melon felon out. They are all guilty of corrupting global events right now.
TheCheshire@reddit
Who is melon felon, and why exactly?
RueTabegga@reddit
The American president
TheCheshire@reddit
I don't understand the melon part
refusemouth@reddit
It's probably a reference to his orange skin paint resembling the color of a cantaloupe melon. You could also call him Cantaloupe Caligula if you like alliteration, but Caligula wasn't quite as horrible as Trump, in my opinion.
kingfofthepoors@reddit
Russia is probably the greatest benefiter of this whole shebang.
SomeRandomGuydotdot@reddit
Don't forget the Christian nationalists. Don't forget the (White) American Catholic movement out there voting to stop 'the silent genocide'. Don't forget the tech oligarchs thinking chaos is a fucking ladder. Don't forget the finance oligarchs silently thanking god there's a war to distract from PE melting down.
The dysfunction going on right now is systemic. There's a reason our opposition party and legal system in the US are so toothless to stop this. Large portions of our political system has essentially melted down.
youcantexterminateme@reddit
The amazing thing is that fertilizer doesnt just disappear into thin air, or not much of it. But yeah, lets keep buying it.
Current-Code@reddit
As far as Europe is concerned, the impact is estimated between 3% and 6% price increase ON TOP of inflation, so anywhere around 5% and 10% increase on your bill.
If there was a case for having your financials in check as the first prep, this is it.
This is the kind of price shock that is 100% absorbable if you are prepared and your finances are healthy, but could drive you homeless if they aren't.
Take notes people, this is what collapse looks like, get ready for more and more of those price surge each time a regional crisis happens.
Anxious_cactus@reddit
This sucks so bad. I'm in Croatia and we already had like 25-40% increase in food prices in the last 3 years since we switched from local currency to Euro.
Average pay here is 1200€ monthly, minimum wage is 850€ net. Price of chicken is around 15€ per kg, used to be 7€ per kg in 2023. Price of a pizza is 15-20€, which is almost 3-5 times more than in ITALY.
Currently half of my monthly wage (500€) goes to food, and that's with bargain shopping and cooking at home, many meals don't even have meat or anything that should be exotic or expensive, I do a lot of vegetable stews etc.
SweetAlyssumm@reddit
The good news is what you are doing is healthier - cooking at home, reducing meat, lots of vegetables. What you are missing from not eating out is the excessive sodium and the lack of fiber. I salute your vegetables!
GardenScared8153@reddit
chicken is like 7 $ usd per kg in Lebanon a war torn country run by robber barons, I second the other redditor who suggested this was a magic chicken at 15 euros per kg, that's insane you are being ripped off. Chicken breasts go for 11 $ usd /kg.
Anxious_cactus@reddit
Yeah it's horrible, that used ro be the price of high quality beef! Now beef is like 20-23€ per kg, insane prices and it's not even free range or local, it's from Hungary and Poland
imalostkitty-ox0@reddit
Important for people all the way from North America to the Middle East to see that developed, primarily “white” (assumed as educated, well-fed, living a simple secure life with most needs met, not running away from psychos with machine guns 24-7 like in Sudan) countries are still, in 2026, not even paying their employees anything close to livable wages. It’s scary. We won’t be talking about childcare or even healthcare anymore in the U.S., we’ll just be talking about war, food, and water for the rest of our lives. Nobody will dare suggest that the machinery that’s been pumping and dumping humanity for the last 100+ years pay its fair share, nor even remark that such a thing could guarantee that today’s living humans at least have the means to survive until 2060-2070. Such a thing is thought of as heresy by the elite, as the only “viable” solution is for every country to lose its pound of flesh, i.e. as much of the population as physically possible.
The dehumanization stage is well underway. Armed forces around the world are developing; ICE/CBP have comparable counterparts in many other countries acting essentially as masked street thugs with state support.
The idea isn’t immediately to round people up all at once, and throw them away.
It’s to get citizens desensitized to the psychological pathology known as “splitting”. This is the behavior of mentally splitting humans into one of two black & white “all good” or “all bad” categories. For example:
There are “good” Palestinians in Israel, and “bad” ones. The “good ones” are your doctor at the hospital, your pharmacist, etc., while the “bad” ones are the ones you never have to engage in conversation — the people you see “over there,” on television, “away from here,” even though “over there” might be no more than a handful of miles. People didn’t just put up with this constant relentless killing, they reveled in it, and became more cohesive as a society than they ever had been, despite a totalitarian coup having taken place in the year of 2023 right before the famous attack. The country managed to get along (98% support for war in many polls), while simultaneously whittling a population down purely for the sake of whittling the population down.
Israelis partied. They wore makeup on TikTok to impersonate Palestinian victims, drawing unibrows on their foreheads and darkening their teeth to make it look like they were missing. They filmed their own babies dressed up like this, because they were mass-traumatized, and their government chose to amplify their trauma and give them an endless void to shoot their emotions into. If you want to actually kill some random people, you can sign up if you meet the requirements, and when you come home, everyone will treat you like a hero for having maybe shot 9 innocent people for every Hamas soldier you even see. People party, they fuck, they use all sorts of drugs, they scream and cheer at the sky in the middle of the streets, they engage in orgies. They have truly become the absolute most unencumbered society in modern history, in all senses.
So, the Gaza model worked. It proved that it is possible to do mass extermination in close proximity of “good citizens” who are themselves living underneath a microscope. They will laugh and cry and love and hate, drink themselves into oblivion, anything it takes but to look at photographic/video evidence of what has been done “in the name of” their so-called “freedom”.
The present goal of fascism is not to eliminate as many lives as possible right now, it is to desensitize the public into psychologically “forgetting” the people who disappear, never to return.
When the system, guided by AI, has desensitized the American public to the extent that they no longer have the will, capability, or daily caloric input to devote to the rescuing of potential disappeared humans, the next phase will start.
Tech cities will flourish, as former city centers become glaring opportunities for acts of terrorism under the “oops! It’s a casualty of war!” doctrine.
Mass, systematized death seems to be the preferred method of attaining “net zero” emissions.
Livid_Village4044@reddit
Grain, legumes, and nuts, in a 4-2-1 ratio, provide complete protein.
I have been vegetarian, but the overpopulating Bambi dears here are hard to keep off my crops, so I'm starting to eat the deer. I am blessed to have land to grow food, and free wood heat from my forest in winter.
InvertedDinoSpore@reddit
That is absolutely insane are they magic fuckin chickens or something?
And the pizza... My god
Current-Code@reddit
Do you know about r/frugal ? They do have good tips from time to time on how to save and stay on a budget.
Very US focused, so in a way, often not really aligned with reality of "real" imposed frugality, but I have found a few good tips here and there
ommnian@reddit
It's survivable if you live in the "global north". If you're living in Africa, central or south America, South Asia, etc... maybe not so much.
Current-Code@reddit
Still survivable if you have your assets in order, which I agree, is harder to do there, but that's kind of my point.
To often in that sub I see comments like "why should I care about money/career/study/etc.", when really, all preppers should start there, and this food crisis is just the perfect illustration.
Obviously, the poor are going to suffer more, and that is entirely my point.
Sapient_Cephalopod@reddit
Do you have a source at hand? This concerns me personally. Thanks:)
Current-Code@reddit
I'd start there and work from his source
Mostest_Importantest@reddit
Guys, don't worry about it.
Like, seriously.
Here's how things are gonna play out:
We loot, rampage, pillage, and mass panic ourselves waaaaaaay after there's any chance to avoid mass starvation.
The survivors begin migration process to all those honeyed lands that the optimists promise will serve as little Noah's arkitittos to allow humanity to survive into the millennia.
They'll die out, too, around 200 years from now.
See? Now that there's a plan/forecast, we can at least breathe a little easier.
This stuff is almost as nerve racking as wondering if the Seahawks would win their division title or not. I hadn't planned to watch the Superbowl. I was counter protesting the protestors that weren't watching because they hated that US citizens speak Spanish and sing better than them and are better people by a wide margin overall or something.
Plus our idiot country is full of idiot pedophiles and supporters and powerless/apathetic/impotent/shell-shocked/exhausted citizenry just like the Weimar republic or the tail end of WWII as all forces marched on Berlin, and we've bombed more people and it's all so exciting now.
So when you really think about it, there really is no real reason to worry
WHALE_PHYSICIST@reddit
CherryChabbers@reddit
All form comes to an end. We are never locked into form eternally because we are the timeless, formless, causeless, spaceless Absolute.
64-17-5@reddit
Just like COVID, we will once again learn how fragile our world are.
StatementBot@reddit
The following submission statement was provided by /u/relianceschool:
Submission statement: Global food prices have hit record levels due to modern agriculture's dependence on fossil fuels, which have risen in price due to the conflict in Iran. Farmers are scaling down in response, which experts predict will lead to shortfalls and even higher prices later this year. Jennifer Clapp states that:
This impacts lower-income populations the most, when people are unable to absorb the increase in prices:
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1sfwo1b/food_shock_is_inevitable_due_to_the_iran_war_and/of0l9l9/
relianceschool@reddit (OP)
Submission statement: Global food prices have hit record levels due to modern agriculture's dependence on fossil fuels, which have risen in price due to the conflict in Iran. Farmers are scaling down in response, which experts predict will lead to shortfalls and even higher prices later this year. Jennifer Clapp states that:
This impacts lower-income populations the most, when people are unable to absorb the increase in prices: