Speaking at the sidelines of Bloomberg's New Economy Forum in Singapore, Sara Menker, founder and CEO of Gro Intelligence, cautioned that the current food crisis surpassed the one in 2007-08, which ultimately sparked Arab Spring across the Middle East a few years later. This is primarily due to elevated crop prices and steep declines in local currencies against the dollar. 

Bloomberg's Yvonne Man asked Menker: "When we talk about where we see food prices - come off from the record highs of last year. What drives food insecurity is wars, climate change, and economic shocks. And we're feeling that on all fronts right now... So what worries you the most?" 

Menker responded: "It's actually the narrative that food prices have come off the highs, which has been the narrative we're using because we're all following future markets that are all dollar-denominated as a gauge of where food prices are." 

She said, "Year-on-year food prices have come off quite substantially."

"But what has happened in most other parts of the world that import food - is that food prices continue to go up because local currencies are weakening significantly against the dollar," she said, adding, "People eat in local currency and not in US dollars."

She pointed out, "While wheat futures are down double digits year on year - it's up double digits year on year in Egypt because the price of importing wheat has gone up just due to the decimation of the Egyptian pound." 

Menker said in Syria, food inflation is up 2,000%, 1,200% in Lebonan, and 700% in Argentina. She said the food crisis "is far from over for most people in the world." 

Later in the interview, Man asked Menker: "Where are we headed now? Obviously, we look at the 2007-08 food crisis at that time. Are we getting closer to that scenario?" 

Menker's response was apocalyptic: "Actually, I think we are much worse." 

She explained again, "Where food prices are in a lot of countries - if you take it in a local currency basis - food prices are significantly higher when compared to 2007-08." 

Here's the interview.

For some context, after global food prices spiked in 2007-08, in late 2010 and early 2011, discontent over soaring prices triggered the Arab Spring. 

In late 2020, SocGen's Albert Edwards started to warn about the Federal Reserve blowing bubbles during the Covid pandemic and how it could spark a rise in food prices and the usually ongoing risks, such as social-economic instabilities. 

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations recently warned the world food import bill jumped to nearly $2 trillion in 2022 as many poor countries are on the brink of crisis. 

This time, unlike a decade ago, the Western world has been battered with food inflation crushing tens of millions of low-income folks. 

Everything is fine ... ???????????? pic.twitter.com/hEpZZ3moUE

— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) November 9, 2023

"There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy," American investigative journalist Alfred Henry Lewis stated in 1906. 

Authored by Raymond Ibrahim via AmericanThinker.com,

What is ultimately behind so many of the (manufactured) ills currently plaguing the West, from leftist lunacy and gender insanity to unnecessary lockdowns and wars?

In a word, the ultra-rich -- the billionaire elite.  So argues bestselling author Hanne Nabintu Herland in her latest book, The Billionaire World: How Marxism Serves the Elite.

In a series of brisk chapters, Herland -- a historian of religions and founder of The Herland Report -- traces all the world’s major problems back to the billionaire elite and their use of Marxist repression and social engineering. 

While this may seem counterintuitive, Herland makes -- and documents -- several powerful arguments. 

The fact that a tiny elite control much can be seen in that  even seemingly opposing and competing brands, such as Coke and Pepsi, are usually owned by the same company, says Herland.  The same applies to supposedly opposing “leftist” and “rightist” media. Six corporations control 90% of all U.S. media. As for the political arena, the “richest 0.01% have accounted for 40% of all campaign contributions through corporate donations.”

In short, “These mastodonte private companies completely dominate our way of life, what we eat, drink, watch on TV, what we wear, and who we vote for.”

Little wonder that, no matter what happens in the world, and no matter how such developments are detrimental to the average person, the ultra-rich tend to only get richer. According to Herland, “82% of all wealth generated in 2017 went to the richest 1% among us, while the poorest world population of 3.7 billion saw no increase in wealth.” 

But it’s worse than that; there seems to be a direct correlation between how much poorer the average man gets and how much richer the billionaires get.  Writes Herland,

[T]he richest among us made billions of dollars on the COVID-19 world tragedy, while the world’s poor plunged into unimaginable poverty…  The shutdown strategy made the billionaires’ profit soar.  In the span of just a few months in 2020, Bill Gates made $75 billion, Jeff Bezos $67.9 billion, Mark Zuckerberg $37.8 billion, and Elon Musk $33.6 billion.

Meanwhile, 48% of small business owners in America experienced severe economic turmoil -- with fully one-third of them going bankrupt, and with Black-owned businesses suffering disproportionately -- due to this lockdown that otherwise profited the billionaires.

From a macro-historic perspective, the  West is slowly regressing, and the ultra-rich are becoming “the globalist version of feudal lords, as the new Western slave class emerges beneath them.”

But how did this lamentable state of affairs comes to pass in the first place?  Marxism -- in its myriad forms and iterations -- is Herland’s answer.  Since the 1960s, beginning with the “free sex and drugs” movement, Marxism, especially in the guise of godless materialism, has wormed its way into Western culture, poisoning, corrupting and destroying everything that originally made the West great, and therefore making it ripe for the most powerful -- meaning the richest -- to manipulate and control.   Writes Herland,

The Marxist attack on historic Western values has weakened the very core of our culture, destroyed social stability and the family, quenched free speech and silenced the people -- and thereby removed the obstacles for the billionaire class to gain centralized control… The combination of strong private corporations coupled with political socialist ideologies has pushed for a radical groupthink model in which the population is expected to agree with the consensus -- not unlike that which we witnessed during National Socialism in Germany before and during World War II.”

Marxism is especially apt at exploiting any environment where freedom and liberty erode and are replaced with groupthink.  In the words of Vladimir Lenin:

We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law-breaking, withholding and concealing truth... We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion and scorn towards those who disagree with us.

It needs no great expounding to say that these tactics dominate all social and political discourse today -- more than a century after they were first written down.

There is much more to recommend Herland’s Billionaire World. Almost every pressing topic -- including the politicization of science, the rise of (openly Marxist) groups such as Black Lives Matter (BLM), the global persecution of Christians, the stoking of racial tensions, and the rewriting of history -- is connected to the overlooked role of the billionaire elites and their self-serving agendas.

*  *  *

Raymond Ibrahim, author of Defenders of the West and Sword and Scimitar is the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and the Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.