An Upcoming Famine?

When I went grocery shopping Monday afternoon, I picked up 8 bags of pasta. Tomorrow when I go shopping after taking the kidlets to the library, I plan on getting a 20 pound bag of rice.

No, we're not gluttons (well, not my kids or my husband at least, and not me to that extreme), but I'm starting to get a little concerned. All that flooding going on in the midwest? It's destroying some of the crops in this country. I saw a sign at the grocery store the other day saying that weather in other parts of the world were making bananas harder to get to America, and another friend in another part of the country saw the same sign. Ever since then, the bananas that have arrived have been more bruised and have been of poorer quality, and the price went up $.20 a pound. In Asia, some of the rice harvest has been decimated and the price of rice is going up there... some countries are not going to be exporting.

The cost of food is going up all over the world, according to MSN. Food is getting more scarce everywhere.

Here is a video from CNN about the subject:



In the US, many of us depend on the grocery stores to supply us with our daily bread. What would happen if a major shock to the world's food supply hit the news today? What would happen if you turned to CNN.com and discovered that several countries had decided that instead of exporting their food, they were going to keep it inside their own countries in order to keep their citizens from starving? What if a major weather event hit our country this year and most of the crops were destroyed? All at the same time? Do you think that the grocery stores would empty pretty fast?

We've lived in a land of plenty for so long, that we think that a food shortage could never happen here. Perhaps the people of Egypt felt the same way during Joseph's day? There were seven years of bountiful harvests. You say, Joseph was storing grain away... but the people were not. The Egyptians ended up giving Joseph all their gold, then they ended up selling their livestock to Egypt, and eventually the country ended up owning everything that the Egyptians had, because they had no other way to get food but to sell all. They obviously weren't planning for famine, or they would not have had to sell everything that they owned in that manner.

I don't have the resources to gather much, but at this point I think that getting a little extra is a good idea. The Bible says that in the beginning of the tribulation, there will be famine. The rapture will take the Christians away before the tribulation, but that doesn't mean that there will be an abundance of food until that point. If I could, I'd rather be prepared as much as I could. 8 bags of pasta and 20 pounds of rice might not feed a family of 4 for very long if there was nothing else in the store to buy, but it would feed someone a little longer than 0 bags of pasta and 0 pounds of rice would.