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Page added on April 14, 2015
What Would You Do if Restaurants and Your Local Grocery Store Closed Tomorrow?
If all the supermarkets and restaurants in your neighborhood closed their doors tomorrow, would you know how to source your next meal? Would you be able to survive in a world without a local grocery store or eatery? While the thought of losing your local market may seem extreme, hundreds of thousands of people around the world are faced with the daily challenge of finding the food to fuel their day. According to the World Food Program, there are nearly 805 million undernourished people in the world today and one in nine people do not get enough food to be healthy and lead an active life.
While a family of local farmers and communities thousands of miles away may seem disconnected from your daily meal, that is all but certain to change in the years ahead. In a globalized and highly interconnected world, the domino effects from a crop shortage in a far away place can impact prices and supplies at your local supermarket. For example, according to the crop estimate committee this year’s white corn supply in South Africa, the world’s largest producer of the white variety after Mexico, is set to shrink 32 percent from 2014’s harvest, the biggest drop in 33 years. The limited global availability of white corn raises prices in South Africa, but can also impact prices in China or Japan where large amounts of corn are imported. In today’s world, a single failure in one agricultural sector can have global ramifications far and wide.
In the words of Lester Brown, founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute, “The threats to our future now are climate change, population growth, water shortages, poverty, rising food prices and failing states.” A new study by researchers at NASA and the University of California, Irvine, finds global warming is rapidly melting section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet appears to be in an irreversible state of decline. With 23 percent of the world’s population live in coastal areas and big portions of farmland (especially rice) cultivated on the coasts, the rising sea levels from melting ice can destroy that farmland and displace population, adding more strain on an already struggling system. The impact of a changing climate in the developing world affects the agricultural sector heavily, putting an immense cost on poor farmers who do not have insurance or the resources to rebuild their lives after floods, droughts or other extreme events, according to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). The importance of reliable, affordable food is why each and everyone one of us should care today about the changing climate.
Armed conflicts and civil instability are also causing food insecurity situations. In communities ranging from the Philippines to Colombia conflicts are forcing many farmers off of their fields and into refugee settlements, and that can amplify the international domino effect of food prices and availability. In conflict-affected parts of Colombia, farming has become nearly impossible. In the Philippines fighting between government forces and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, a rebel group, have forced more than 120,000 people to flee their homes since late January according to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR). The small-scale farmers, fishermen and agricultural based communities like those in the Philippines and Colombia not only depend on their land to survive, but their labours account for most of the outputs that feed the rest of the world.
What can international leaders do in the face of this growing food crisis? A strengthened focus on environmental sustainability and internally displaced peoples is needed, but planning for adaptation to a worsening situation is also required, as the impact is already being felt. The advance of mobile communication allows international organizations and local institutions to assess the situation in even the most disconnected areas where food crisis are happening in real time. The World Food Program, in partnership with InSTEDD, is working on automated food security surveys, taking weekly samples from different beneficiaries of food assistance and analyzing their needs and context. How well they have been eating? What was the intake of foods? This type of real-time two way information can improve assistance to communities that are most vulnerable while also informing international agencies of where the food insecurity situation is most pressing.
What can you do as a consumer? A deeper understanding of where your food comes from is a first step. By buying from local producers, you contribute to strengthen the self-reliance of your region while reducing the dependence on food imports and at the same time minimizing the carbon footprint of your food. Try to buy most of your food from organic farms (fertilizer overuse creates soil acidification which in turns reduces yields and pollutes water, killing fish and other food sources) and buying in season reduces the chances that your food is being transported from far away. Consider what it might take to become self reliant, even a hobby garden can help you get closer to how your food is grown and allow you to be more knowledgeable and aware of the rising food insecurity problem.
Want more information on the Food Security issue? Check out the World Food Program food security report.
27 Comments on "What Would You Do if Restaurants and Your Local Grocery Store Closed Tomorrow?"
Rodster on Tue, 14th Apr 2015 7:59 pm
Don’t be fooled by the local markets. Many of them are getting the same supplies from everyone else. Small local farms is one thing while local markets gets a little trickier.
Makati1 on Tue, 14th Apr 2015 8:01 pm
Not 1 in 1,000 Westerners would have any idea how to grow their own food and not 1 in 10,000 would know how to preserve it for winter or have the resources. Few will even try to learn, before the collapse, as they are in denial, but they will wish that they had learned.
Davy on Tue, 14th Apr 2015 8:30 pm
Makster, I thought everything was peachy in the P’s per your travel agent reports. What’s wrong?
“In the Philippines fighting between government forces and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, a rebel group, have forced more than 120,000 people to flee their homes since late January according to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR).”
Makster, you can rightly bash the westerner but 4BIL people live in a space smaller than Russia and that place is called Asia. Asia is the land of the coming bottleneck. You are in heart of that potential bottleneck. Your apartment is right in the middle of the 12MIL people of Manila.
Makati1 on Wed, 15th Apr 2015 12:41 am
You really need to get a life Davy, lol. Or at least read some real news not US MSM Iron Curtain propaganda. The problems in Mindanao are ongoing and minor. I suspect it is the Us meddling there that is causing most of the problems. We cannot seem to keep our fingers out of other people’s business.
I have been here 7+ years and nothing has gotten worse except that Us military personnel going ashore are now restricted to a curfew of 10PM and many restrictions on where they can go and what they can do. It seems the Filipinos are tired of the American’s poor morals and drunken rapes.
Better you think about the 3rd world America you are going to be living in soon. Not my situation ~10,000 miles away. I am happy with my choice and know more about Asia than you do. You only read about it from unreliable sources. I live here.
Davy on Wed, 15th Apr 2015 6:52 am
Mak, the point is your travel agent reporting of the P’s is consistently peachy. I would put this on par with the hopium and happiness preached by the iron curtain people. You are as bad as the people you preach against Mak. Maybe you need a life and need to leave your apartment and travel around your adopted country for better info.
paulo1 on Wed, 15th Apr 2015 9:01 am
People that are not considering their future supply of food and water have their heads in the sand. We take so much for granted in our world.
Having said that I believe there will always be some people who will sell food to others. You see entrepreneurs filling a niche, everywhere. I remember walking down a poor street in Mexico one day and seeing a lady selling just a few sweets off a table in front of her home. There were always little stores and stalls selling food and at night the vendor carts came out for the promenade. The quality of our food will most likely improve, as far as I’m concerned.
Lawfish1964 on Wed, 15th Apr 2015 9:23 am
Well, I must be the one in 1000, Mak. As I write, I’m eating a salad of mackerel, chick peas, and chopped veggies. My family and I caught 19 mackerel Saturday. Fed the masses, then I pressure-canned the rest and ended up with 15 single-serving jars. It’s delicious. I eat it in place of tuna. And I currently have 32 tomato plants all thriving from the pig poop fertilizer I use (we have a Vietnamese potbelly). Got 3 beds of potatoes growing nicely, along with peas, cabbage, onions, cukes and watermelons. Last year I had 27 tomato plants and I ended up canning about 6 quarts. Used the last jar about a month ago. This year, I hope to have a surplus to last until the first fresh tomato of 2016. To do that, I’m ordering heat-loving varieties from Baker Creek Seeds to plant when my spring crop finishes producing.
Finished my chicken coop 2 weeks ago so I now have 4 hens soon to be producing eggs.
Not only is the food 1000 times better than that inorganic crap, but it’s “free” and very nutritious.
Dredd on Wed, 15th Apr 2015 10:17 am
I would suspect that Oil-Qaeda had done damage to the ports of the world (Will This Float Your Boat – 8).
Davy on Wed, 15th Apr 2015 10:23 am
The Makster has to lash out however he can when his double standards are threatened. Makster, you tell me I better get used to 3rd world living. Makster, why do you think I am dooming and prepping with a doomstead and lifestyle to match? Do you think I am doing that to prepare for a 1st world living?
Law, I have a 22,500 sq/ft garden which is 1/3 fruit trees, 1/3 grape vine, 1/3 vegetables. Goats, cattle, and chickens are being organized as we speak. Makster you can generalize about a continent sized country but that just make you look like a hypocritical agendist with a personal message. In your case the personal message is “I failed as an American so I hate America”. What a dork and please get a life. Quit talking about your farm and get out there and start farming.
Apneaman on Wed, 15th Apr 2015 11:25 am
I just need to get a hold of that cook book that was featured in that old Twilight episode.
To Serve Man
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6dXsjKcA9I
Northwest Resident on Wed, 15th Apr 2015 11:32 am
To answer the question asked in the title of this article:
I would switch to “high alert” mode. My TOP priority would immediately become protecting the accumulated long term food storage that I have, and the significant food production capability (mini-farm) that I have going in my backyard. We can reasonably assume that if all restaurants and food stores suddenly close, then so would just about every other business, meaning no more job. It would be time to “circle the wagons” at home, to go on high alert, to lock and load, and to lay low.
BobInget on Wed, 15th Apr 2015 12:01 pm
Most of the planet’s population live near
what are today climate moderated costal climates.
First of all, this article, while correct in total, is alarmist by inception. .
We won’t run out of fuel (and food) overnight.
Proper food is already becoming too expensive for poor working classes.
California’s drought will make matters worse.
Forget about your own problems for a sec.
DARE to open this recent UNICEF report.
http://www.unicef.org/drought/drought-countries.htm
That’s NOW..
Costal regions won’t flood (periodically but not entirely) in months but decades.
We are seeing Climate Changes induced mass migrations out of Africa. Almost daily,
we could, but don’t, read of overloaded boats capsizing with deadly result.
(600 dead in one incident yesterday)
Posters here blithely write of ‘growing their own’. Most of the world’s billions don’t have
that option. (if YOU DO, share)
I’ve not witnessed a food riot. I hope none here will either.
For your young children, riots become as day to day as overloaded migrant boats are on our newscasts.
Right Wingers, Ayn Rand types will urge you to buy weapons, bar windows and doors, stronger gates, keep rabble , (your neighbors)
at bay.
Old Lefties like myself, urge you to live each
day enjoying your fellow humans.
Harsh truths around climate changes are difficult for single persons to manage.
What paths to take, even more so.
That’s why web sites such as this one are
somehow cathartic.
Lawfish1964 on Wed, 15th Apr 2015 12:18 pm
Davy, I’m jealous! My garden consists of 500 sq. feet and 2 small raised beds, 10 containers of peppers, a blood orange tree and 2 apple trees. I don’t have much more room unless I take out azaleas (and don’t think I haven’t thought about it, but my wife would not go along with that. Still, I get a lot of production. I’m expecting maybe 60 to 75 lbs. of potatoes this year, which is a fair amount of carbs.
The lot adjacent to my back yard is owned by an old rich woman who taught at my high school. It’s big enough to grow food for my family and her daughter’s (which is adjacent to both my house and the lot). I’ve approached her about growing food on that land, but she just ignored me. she’s from old banking money and I’m sure she couldn’t have the neighborhood looking like poor people live here.
Northwest Resident on Wed, 15th Apr 2015 12:20 pm
BobInget — For those of us growing our own food… When the JIT systems break down and there are suddenly swarms of starving people, we growing-our-own types will have a choice: (a) Share, and by so doing immediately join those ranks of starving masses or (b) Hoard, lay low, be ready to protect what you have but what the starving masses were unwilling to, incapable of, or unaware of the need to do — and by so doing, survive, or at least greatly increase the odds. In a mass starvation scenario, to share is to die. Stark reality. Hard choices. Cruel reality. If you want to survive, then you better be ready to deal with it.
Northwest Resident on Wed, 15th Apr 2015 12:22 pm
Lawfish1964 — Speaking of backyard food production. I can’t resist the urge to blow my own horn a little (I earned that right by hours and hours of hard manual labor and dedicated study) and show you MY backyard “garden”. I had to cut trees and dig up piles of roots. Now I also have a major compost station going, and two beehives.
http://s1383.photobucket.com/user/NWR2015/library/?sort=9&page=1
Davy on Wed, 15th Apr 2015 1:14 pm
Yea, law but now I need some help. Big gardens lots of labor.
I treat my garden as a food bank. I am not so concerned about raising all my food as having food in the ground if needed. So IOW I am not intensively working the garden. The infrastructure is there and ready. I have plenty of food in the ground. I could do so much more but I have lots of irons in the fire.
Don on Wed, 15th Apr 2015 1:20 pm
I had a Chinese friend at work before I moved. Her family came to visit her over the summer, I hung out with them for a day, and I got to talk with her grandparents, she translated for us. They lived through the famine of 1943 in Henan. They had the worst stories about this subject that I have ever heard. The one that stands out the most was when they told me they saw families swapping babies with other families so that they wouldn’t have to eat their own child. Cheryl told me that experience left a huge mark on them and then it made sense why when we left the McDonald’s earlier they pocketed the unused napkins and ketchup packets. Of course I had to let her know that her Grandma had just swiped ketchup from McD’s which then led to my little history lesson.
I believe NWR is correct here. It may be a very Atlas Shrugged, Atlantis type view, but, it is a realistic one. You cannot save everyone, but it is your responsibility to take care of yourself, your family, and your friends and in that order.
Lawfish1964 on Wed, 15th Apr 2015 1:48 pm
Wow, NWR! That is a sweet garden! I can’t grow corn for some reason, but I’m a master with tomatoes.
Many good points made here. Like Davy, I’m not trying to fully feed the family now (not enough land), but gaining the skills and know-how to grow food. It’s amazing how some foods grow beautifully in one location and others just refuse. So I’m learning what grows well in my climate with minimal external inputs. Have to say I’ll be eating a lot of beans when the SHTF. They don’t need anything but a little water.
I have my 30 acres in the woods, but no structure there yet. I’m hoping for a slow descent so I can spend 5 to 10 years getting ready to live out there where I will have lots of space for keeping animals, growing crops and keeping some distance from the masses. They say if you can’t defend it, you don’t own it. My place in town would be over-run in a minute in a disaster event. For now, plan A is go to the beach and live off of stored food and fish.
BobInget on Wed, 15th Apr 2015 1:49 pm
Speaking of cities. In Seattle one can observe
Asian women ‘gardening’ along roadsides all over town.
In 1976 when fist arrived in Seattle, looking for investment property, we were struck as to how many mature fruit trees were planted along the public walk-ways and in tiny yards.
We were told it was Japanese who were
interned during WW/2, forced to sell out who had planted all those fruiting trees.
Northwest Resident on Wed, 15th Apr 2015 3:05 pm
LawFish — Can’t grow corn? Corn, as you probably already know, requires a LOT of nitrogen — heavy feeder. Whereas beans, being legumes, don’t require ANY nitrogen (or very little) because they basically generate their own nitrogen. That’s why farmers will often plant legume crops prior to planting corn or other “cash crops” that require heavy nitrogen, because a cover crop of legumes will if done right leave enough nitrogen in the soil to grow your corn crop! Just saying… The fact that you CAN grow beans but not corn in the same plot of dirt makes me think you might have a nitrogen deficiency.
Lawfish1964 on Wed, 15th Apr 2015 3:23 pm
Well, NWR, I tried corn once last year and I planted late. Mostly what got to it was the pig. But it was definitely starved for nutrition. I have an ample supply of pig poop which is rich in nitrogen, so maybe I’ll try again. I just figure cowpeas and other legumes are better crops to grow because they don’t require so much input, and, as you say, they don’t need nitrogen, they make it.
Nony on Wed, 15th Apr 2015 5:19 pm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWC6W1ctkMY
Corn and zucchini. Note the 2005 date of the video. Long time for prepping…
ghung on Wed, 15th Apr 2015 5:23 pm
Grow beans and corn together; the beans climb the corn stalks and the corn doesn’t mind a bit.
Between the rain showers I’ve been working on upgrading the water system at the garden; replaced the white PVC from the spring with black poly pipe (had some complaints that the white stuff was unsightly, and the PVC was getting brittle anyway. Tested the new solar pump; works fine even with the cloud cover. Should really pump a lot of water when (if) the sun comes out. Very wet spring here; 18 inches since New Years; 5 this month. Hoping it’ll let up so I can grade the site for our new high tunnel green house (70×32 feet). Looking forward to having more control over the growing environment.
My high tunnel mentor already has strawberries and grew greens through the winter. He set a new row of strawberry plants in September and they are huge; very happy. He also has blueberries in the high tunnel that should come in about a month (or more) earlier than his other blueberries.
Having some means of protecting crops from late frosts, too much moisture, hail, high winds, etc. is as critical as having the means to deal with drought conditions for the subsistence/survival grower. A lot of folks around here had crops fail from too much rain last summer, and I’ve had more than one corn crop get blown down in a storm. Varmints such as raccoons can wipe a garden out as well, along with a myriad of other pests. Those who think they’ll just plant a garden when the necessity comes along will likely be in for a tough time.
Other survival foods (wild) in our area like dandelions, cattails, fern fiddles, wild grapes, a virtual cornucopia of medicinals, not to mention wild game and ferrel pigs are in abundance, though that may not last long if the industrial food system fails. Our large garden area is well fenced to keep deer, pigs, and other varmints out; coons, rabbits, groundhogs (easy to shoot, and tasty). Anyone investing in a garden would do well to put in a strong fence. Coons can be deterred by installing a couple of strands of electric fencing. We also ran 2 feet of tight wire (2×4) along the bottom of our fence to keep rabbits out.
Davy on Wed, 15th Apr 2015 7:19 pm
You forgot Blackbirds G-Man. I just bought a bird snap trap. I can also use that to catch quail and dove if need be when times get hard.
Makati1 on Wed, 15th Apr 2015 7:41 pm
It may be worth your while to take a few minutes and read this…
http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/12-bad-strategies-that-will-get-preppers-killed_04142015
Commonsense is rare these days.
peakyeast on Thu, 16th Apr 2015 7:00 am
If the grocery stores and restaurants closed I would hurry up and get some weapons legally or illegally…
hiruitnguyse on Thu, 16th Apr 2015 11:03 am
3 Sisters Garden has been well known for quite a while.