In the twilight of Joe Biden’s presidency, ex-rock star turned MAGA maven Ted Nugent posted an ominous message: “They are not ‘predicting’ food shortages. They are planning them.”
At around the same time, shit-posting Disney action hero and mixed martial artist Gina Carano spotted a grand historical pattern: “Mao attacked farmers. Stalin attacked farmers. Now, world governments are attacking farmers. Same group throughout history. It’s a playbook, it’s not a chance happening. Wake up.” Then Wide Awake Media posted an image of thousands of acres of “prime agricultural land” squandered by solar panels, captioned with a rhetorical question: “is this one of the reasons for the globalist war on agriculture?”
The global famine conspiracists lurk on X and Facebook and YouTube. They are the ones who repeatedly remind us that Henry Kissinger said “control foods and you control the people”, despite the fact he never said such a thing. They will try to convince you that lab-grown meat and red dye 3 and bird flu are all part of the same plan, and that the best defence against a cosmopolitan elite intent on confiscating your farm and foisting crushed beetles down your throat is a gun.
The conspiracy theorist is generally dismissed as an irrational animal, yet the preachers of global famine are obsessed with logic and reason. Their dystopian vision emerges from a complex yet idiosyncratic understanding of history that ranges from Joseph in Egypt to the German multi-national Bayer, engineers of genetically modified Roundup Ready wheat that can only be grown with the aid of their own patented Roundup Ready insecticides — thereby guaranteeing corporate control of the world’s bagels and buns.
Lately, their cup of evidence has runneth over: spiking commodity prices of coffee and cocoa, the mass death of bees, and the fact that a dozen companies own more than 500 consumer brands. Why else would the World Economic Forum force us to consume insects if they were not plotting to make farmers obsolete? Then there’s Tucker Carlson, who registered his famine fears during the Netherlands farmer protests in 2022: “Messing with the food supply tends to cause food crises, and then famine,” he surmised. “We should be worried with the big things. And the food supply is the biggest thing.”
“The preachers of global famine are obsessed with logic and reason.”
One might be tempted to dismiss all this as the latest chapter of a longstanding story that historian Richard Hofstadter dubbed the “The Paranoid Style in American History”, a narrative that lays all our woes at the feet of covert operations. Yet when it comes to global famine, the theorists and their longstanding nemesis — the CIA — are on the same page, along with another unlikely ally, the United States Department of Defense. They all agree on one thing: how fast civil society can crumble when starvation knocks.
The espionage professional knows two truths about hunger: the first is that people do not starve because there is not enough food, but — as Nobel Prize laureate Amartya Sen has proven over and over again, from the Bengal famine of 1943 to Bangladesh in 1974 to Somalia and Sudan several times over — they starve because they cannot afford the price of food. In his groundbreaking work, Poverty and Famines, Sen showed that during the worst period of the Irish famine of the 1840s, ships packed with wheat, oats, cattle, hogs, eggs, and butter sailed south from the hardest hit areas to the markets of London. Similarly, during the worst of the Ethiopian famine of 1973, the country’s food production did not decline. The problem was that the food that could have saved famine-struck regions like the Wollo province and Tigray went to more affluent purchasers in Addis Ababa instead. Such food “counter-movements” led Sen to conclude that famines had as much to do with money and politics as with agricultural output, which in turn indicated that direct cash supplements, for instance, could help solve the problem. No matter how many poor people starved, the rich never lost their most basic entitlement: a full stomach.
The second truth is that one of the quickest paths to massive popular demonstrations — and even regime change — is food inflation, hashtag the 2011 uprisings and conflicts throughout Syria, Iraq, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen, collectively known as the “Arab Spring”.
These ideas have defined American government policy. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the newly formed United States Department of Homeland Security defined the food sector as one of 17 federally recognised “critical infrastructures”. War games ensued, such as the “Silent Farmland” exercise in North Carolina, the “Silent Prairie” exercise in Washington, and “Exercise High Stakes” in Kansas. “Food defence” became a term of art, closely followed by a stream of white papers that introduced the idea of “agroterrorism” — that is, chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats to the food supply chain. Such concerns gained credence in 2018 when swine flu swept China, the home of around 400 million pigs — half the world’s supply.
That same year, an eclectic group of academics from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (in other words, the CIA), the United States War College, the Department of Defense, Los Alamos, and NASA’s Earth Observation for Security and Agriculture Consortium published an in-depth study on the risks of catastrophic failure. “Consolidation has become a defining characteristic of the evolution of the global food system,” noted the report. “Capturing any individual concentrated node within the global food system can have widespread and lasting ramifications.”
The way to strengthen the system was clear: build a more complex and resilient web of supply chains, originating from a widespread network of farms. Buying produce from your local green market had become as valuable an asset as signal intelligence from the Mossad. No one noticed the irony that the DOD had come around to the same set of social imperatives as the radical Left La Via Campesina, aka, the Global Peasant Movement: support local farmers.
All of a sudden, everyone agreed — from the tinfoil-hat basement dwellers to cloak-and-dagger spooks to the overalls and pick-up crowd. And today, as American food prices ratchet up hand in hand with Trump tariffs levied against Canada, Europe, Mexico, and just about any food importer anywhere, food security has become an even bigger unifier.
For the person who benefits the most from unaffordable guacamole on Super Bowl Sunday is Vladimir Putin, a man who has made it his life’s work to study the dynamics of regime change — and has now put it in action. As a recent white paper from the Center for Strategic & International Studies noted: “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused the greatest military-related increase in global food insecurity in at least a century.” The Russian president has repeatedly targeted Ukraine’s agricultural infrastructure — its farms, fields, food processing facilities, and agricultural labour force — causing more than $40 billion in losses. The CSIS report concluded that the ensuing trade tensions “undermine European support for Ukraine”.
All this means that food security has become a hot topic in the mainstream media. The faux populists at The New York Post have been all over the food inflation story, noting that since the first of this year, egg and poultry price gouging reports were up more than 840%. The New York Times delivered its inimitable bourgeois version of the crisis, mapping the rising price of beef bourguignon at Le Bouillon Chartier in Paris, thereby revealing the untold story of buttered carrots (the price of the root vegetable has skyrocketed 20% in the last five years, and butter 30%).
Trump isn’t helping the matter. Already, his USDA has cancelled one-billion dollars’ worth of funding for local food purchasing for schools — that is, money to buy produce from nearby farms. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s DOGE has attempted to defund the World Food Program. And Trump’s new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, is doing his best to stop lawsuits against Bayer for their Roundup-induced cancers. If hunger spreads because people can’t afford the price of food, why is the Trump administration tinkering with social security benefits and the SNAP programme for school breakfast and lunch, both of which are now in the sights of the DOGE minions?
Yet, for once, the conspiracists don’t want to hear it. At a time when food security talk consumes the mainstream media — with The New York Times headlining famine in Sudan and Gaza, and even the staid Economist writing of “The coming food catastrophe” — the global famine conspiracy theorists have gone silent. Since Trump came to office, Ted Nugent has been content to hock 50th-anniversary autographed Stranglehold t-shirts. Wide Awake Media is back to analysing the hidden truth bombs dropped by internet paint-by-numbers phenomenon, Bob Ross, RIP. Illuminatibot has reverted to publicising the evils of Frazzledrip — the “elites drug of choice”.
Concerned that after 5,000 years the global hunger conspiracy might have gone silent, I dropped into the DMs of my old friend, Jacob Angeli-Chansley, aka the Q-Anon Shaman (the tattooed young man who wore horns to the January 6 insurrection, then went on hunger strike until he was provided with organic prison food), with whom I had spent some quality time in Phoenix last April. I was gratified to learn he had recently acquired his own cryptocurrency, $haman. Perhaps this was a hedge on food inflation?
I wanted to know how long the MAGA mafia could continue to harness the social media machine before the price of bacon and eggs took down the administration. After all — and just as the Department of Defense and Ted Nugent predicted — it was food inflation (plus a shot or two of senility) that took down Biden.
As usual, Jake was happy to provide the media with true facts: “Whether it’s to make people obese and die early or deathly thin and die early, hunger is the weapon used by tyrants and psychopaths to get their way, when all other means have exhausted themselves.”
Of course, after Trump pardoned him, the Shaman’s first move was to trade in his bullhorn and spear for something far more effective when it comes to protecting his daily bread. As is his wont, he posted it:
“NOW I AM GONNA BUY SOME MOTHA F— GUNS!!!”
