Have You Ever Gone Hungry?

Have you ever gone hungry? Ever had to scavenge for any scrap of food-like garbage just to stave off your gnawing hunger?

Probably not. You can’t even begin to imagine it.

But of the nearly 7 billion people on Earth, an estimated 850 million are undernourished or chronically hungry. With global food production hurting and prices rising, this number is climbing swiftly. In February, the World Bank estimated that food costs had pushed 44 million more people into these unhappy ranks just since last June.

Forty-four million. Between June and February. More than 180,000 new people going hungry every day. The entire population of Huntsville, or Providence, or Tallahassee. Day after day after day. If that rate has continued, nearly 22 million more have joined them since.

When your belly is plenty full, your tendency is to brush aside such facts. After all, what can you do?

But there are several good reasons why you need to give this some serious thought—because chances are extremely high that soon, you won’t just be reading about those hunger pains.

Stop a moment and think about just how much you take plentiful food for granted. In the First World, we have enjoyed several decades of practically unprecedented abundance—limitless food variety, available year round, at some of the cheapest prices enjoyed on a mass scale in human history. Thanks to increased food production, the share of underfed people on our planet has been dropping for centuries; in recent decades—until lately, anyway—percentages of malnourished and starving people have been more than halved.

No wonder we take it all for granted. This auspicious historical anomaly is the new reality. The party can last forever, right?

Well, there is a catch. This period of plenty has largely been sponsored by a complete revolution in the way we produce and distribute what we eat. And along the way, this revolution has made us dangerously vulnerable to massive disruptions in our food supply.

As our modern world has shifted from an agricultural society to an industrial and now a service- and information-based society, farmers have vanished en masse. A century ago, one in four Americans lived on a farm, and the average farmer grew enough food to feed 12 other Americans. Today, while the nation’s population has more than tripled to over 300 million, only 2 million farmers remain. On average, each one grows food to feed 140 people.

Making food has become a profession for experts. In the First World, less than 2 percent of the population is feeding the other 98 percent. The vast majority of us get our food from hundreds or thousands of miles away, and have only about a week’s worth of groceries in the pantry. We are wholly sustained by a complex system about which we are almost completely ignorant.

Each step in this intricate process is susceptible to major potential breakdowns.

The reason this matter is increasingly becoming a concern is that signs of those breakdowns have started to appear.

This month the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization said that worldwide, the cost of a typical food basket rose 48 percent from a year ago. According to the World Bank, global wheat prices have more than doubled since the second half of last year, and corn, sugar and oil costs have taken off. The G-20’s agriculture ministers met last week amid mounting evidence that these high prices are only going to get worse—along with food shortages.

“The problem is very complex,” says Julian Cribb, author of The Coming Famine. “The population is increasing, more children are being born and people are living longer. At the same time, we are seeing shortages of water, land, oil, fertilizers, technology, stable climates and finance.”

Every year, the human race produces 100 million more mouths to feed. But the problem isn’t just more mouths—it is what is going into those mouths. The average person worldwide eats 20 percent more calories per day than 50 years ago. And in many cases, those calories require considerably more energy to produce. For example, the emerging middle class in China and India has a growing appetite for meat, poultry, dairy and fish—far more labor- and energy-intensive menu items than rice and vegetables. As Cribb brings out in his book, China’s meat consumption tripled in less than 15 years, “requiring a tenfold increase in the grain needed to feed the animals and fish” (emphasis added). Within a short 15 years, China’s grain consumption rose 1,000 percent!

The combination of global population and food demand is rising about 2 percent a year. Food production is rising at only half that rate.

You can add to this fundamental reality a myriad of other pressures on the food supply. More adverse weather—droughts, floods, and other disasters—that reduce crop yields or wipe out harvests. Vanishing marine life, including ocean fish catches—the top source of protein for Asians—because of over-fishing, pollution and other causes. Government enactments like farm subsidies, food price controls or taxes, regulations and restrictions and so on.

Paul Roberts lists still more factors in his 2008 book The End of Food. “Arable land is growing scarcer. Inputs like pesticides and synthetic nitrogen fertilizers are increasingly expensive. Soil degradation and erosion from hyperintensive farming are costing millions of acres of farmland a year. Water supplies are being rapidly depleted in parts of the world, even as the rising price of petroleum—the lifeblood of industrial agriculture—is calling into question the entire agribusiness model.”

For some few realistic observers—and, perhaps, that spreading mass of hungry people who can no longer afford a place at the table—these problems may be “calling into question the entire agribusiness model.” But the reality is, our modern society has become impossibly dependent upon it. Calling that model into question is tantamount to recognizing the inherently, irreversibly flawed nature of civilization as we have created it.

Consider the cold reality as Cribb spells it out in The Coming Famine: “To sum it all up, the challenge facing the world’s 1.8 billion women and men who grow our food is to double their output of food—using far less water, less land, less energy and less fertilizer. They must accomplish this on low and uncertain returns, with less new technology available, amid more red tape, economic disincentives, and corrupted markets, and in the teeth of spreading drought. Achieving this will require something not far short of a miracle.”

My recommendation: Don’t count on that miracle.

Instead, look starkly at present conditions—and then look into your Bible and judge for yourself whether, in fact, the dots we see today connect directly to the prophecies in God’s Word.

In Matthew 24, amid the signs Jesus Christ told us to watch for preceding His Second Coming, He gave this warning: “For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places” (verse 7).

Where are today’s dwindling food stocks and rising prices leading? Bible prophecy gives us a sure and sobering answer. Poor harvests, dwindling supplies of food, breakdowns in food production and distribution, economic collapse that shuts down commerce and the free flow of necessary commodities—all of these conditions, and the nightmares they produce, are about to besiege our world!

Christ’s words are backed by biblical prophecy after prophecy of the most affluent, blessed nations on Earth today suffering a dramatic, precipitous fall into conditions too horrific for our minds to even imagine. Today’s trends link directly with these prophetic warnings, which God recorded to prove His omniscience and omnipotence, and to induce us to repent and turn to Him. You can read many of them in Chapter Three of our booklet The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

With that context, consider Cribb’s chilling observation: “[T]he well-off part of humanity has largely forgotten what it is to go hungry and is awakening to an unpleasant shock: Starvation and the wars, refugee crises, and collapse of nation-states that often accompany hunger have not been permanently banished after all. Indeed, they are once more at our doorstep.”