A fast-food restaurant chain mogul has issued a warning to the public that major global food shortages are coming this winter, urging people to “stock up now.”
Pat McDonagh, the head of Supermac’s, a major fast food chain in Ireland, is telling the general public to begin preparing for the looming global food crisis now by stocking up on non-perishable food.
McDonagh issued a warning during an interview with Irish broadcaster Newstalk.
He put great emphasis on difficulties to do with fertilizer in the country, noting that nations around the world are suffering the same issue.
The lack of fertilizer is so severe that it risks halving farmers’ crop yields.
Despite the danger to the food supply chain, Sri Lanka, the Netherlands, and Canada have still been trying to clamp down on fertilizer use in service of their green agendas.
McDonagh told Newstalk that his fast-food empire is already suffering from an increase in the price of food due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
He continued by warning that the general public — already plagued by an energy and housing crisis — could also soon face widespread food shortages.
“I would be concerned… in one sense there could be a little bit of a scarcity of food towards the end of the winter up towards December,” the Supermac’s head told the broadcaster.
“The price of, say, cooking oil has nearly doubled in the last six months because most of it comes from the sunflower in Ukraine,” he continued.
McDonagh went on to say that many farmers in the region have had their planting disrupted.
Meanwhile, food producers around the world have had to do without fertilizer due to high prices.
He said these two factors would likely extend difficulties to do with food insecurities.
“I would be recommending people to buy a bit of long-life food earlier on,” he also said.
The emphasis the fast-food tsar put on the importance of fertilizer mirrors warnings issued near the beginning of the Ukraine crisis that a shortage of the essential resource could mean a halving of yields, and in turn a seismic rise in the price of food for both the short and medium term.
Despite the obvious importance of growing food to feed people, and the problems which can follow if that supply is disrupted being learned across Europe at the moment, some countries including Sri Lanka, the Netherlands, and Canada, are clamping down on agriculture.
The crackdowns include shutting down agricultural land and restricting the use of fertilizer to meet the goals of their green agendas.
In Canada, the country’s far-left Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has put a limit on the amount of fertilizer that farmers are allowed to use.
The move comes despite protests from local producers that his restrictions are “arbitrary” and endanger both the livelihoods of farmers as well as food prices for the Canadian citizen.
Local publications have started comparing the crackdown on farming underway in the Netherlands, something that has resulted in mass protests from farmers due to the fact the green agenda measures will endanger up to 30 percent of the country’s livestock farms.
Pushed to implement the environmentalist crackdown by the EU, the Dutch government has declared measures that aim to cut the amount of nitrogen pollution in some areas by up to 95 percent.
The government acknowledges the fact that some farms will inevitably go out of business, arguing that it is merely part and parcel of the “unavoidable transition”.
While the green agenda measures have prompted harsh protests that have been disrupting everyday life in the country, the Netherlands is nevertheless in a far better place than Sri Lanka.
Sri Lanka is now suffering serious food, fuel, and medicine shortages as a result of government mismanagement.
The Sri Lankan government’s measures include banning fertilizers in a forced nationwide transition to organic farming.
The plan backfired spectacularly, with the dire physical and economic conditions in the state resulting in mass protests that even forced the nation’s president to flee the country.
