Food Shortages an “Ongoing Issue”

30 Mar Food Shortages an “Ongoing Issue”

By Phil Waldron, CEO and Co-founder MUR

On March 25, 2022, CNN carried the headline, “Biden says Western leaders discussed food shortages, which he says will be ‘real’.” The reason that President Biden believes this to be true is due to the sanctions that are currently being placed against Russia combined with the fact that Ukraine and Russia represent 30% of the world’s production of wheat. This is on top of a crisis in the supply of petroleum. Now that Ukraine’s planting season has been disrupted, due to the war that Russia is waging against them combined with the oil shortage and the embargos that Russia is facing; it seems inevitable that prices will be going up, and the supply will be less than in normal years.

Food scarcity is something that past generations dealt with on a frequent basis. History is replete with waves of “famine” that wiped out large populations. Today, in the US and other industrialized nations, it is almost unheard of that there would be scarcity of any food products that we consider staples to our diet and lifestyle. However, in developing countries, doing without due to food scarcity is an all too often occurrence. As a result, the topic of Food Security is a theme that is often discussed. The following is the definition of food security, according to concern.net:

“Food security is the measure of an individual’s ability to access food that is nutritious and sufficient in quantity. Some definitions of food security specify that food must also meet an individual’s food preferences and dietary needs for active and healthy lifestyles.”

Anecdotally, here in Honduras food scarcity is an ongoing issue. As a young boy, I lived in Asia and saw countless groups of people who were extremely poor. In my experience, the scale of poverty in Honduras is not at all like that which I saw in Asia as a boy. However, the majority of the people are poor and suffer in some form or another of food insecurity. That is one of the reasons that we are focused on agriculture at our Moses Project.

At present, we are still working to make our ag-businesses profitable. This year, with God’s blessing, we will see our first, substantial profit from the years of work and investment leading up to this moment. There are so many benefits that we will be deriving from this investment for years to come. Some of those are: 1) We provide a quality product to the market that keeps the supply at a level that helps prevent scarcity and thus inflationary prices that result from such scarcities, 2) Our young men that are in the Moses Project are learning about agriculture on a commercial scale that we hope will inspire them to be agriculture entrepreneurs in their own communities of origin in the future, and 3) In time, we hope to generate sufficient net income from these operations to fund the startup of small ag-businesses for these young men.

This vision is an integral plan that truly addresses root causes of illegal migration, gang violence, etc. With God’s blessing, we will be producing a whole new generation of community and church leaders that have the values and skills to be employers and income producers in their families and communities. We believe this to be part of God’s kingdom advancing its frontiers by establishing self-supporting, employment generating, Christian leaders in each community from which our Moses Project charges come from.