In an interview, war correspondent Michael Yon warns of an emerging global famine that would be triggered less by immediately empty shelves than by disruptions to transportation and production systems. He says decisive factors are maritime chokepoints such as the Strait of Hormuz, the Suez Canal, and the Turkish straits, through which not only commercial goods but also food, fertilizer, and fuel are transported. If several of these bottlenecks were disrupted at the same time, the effects could cascade worldwide and hit supply chains and households on a broad scale.
Yon cites Thailand—one of the world’s largest rice exporters—as an early warning signal. He says the country is particularly vulnerable because of its dependence on fuel and fertilizer: if energy flows tighten, production falls, and smaller harvests in a key exporting country could translate into supply problems in other regions. Yon says he has been warning for six years about precisely this development, and he already sees early disruptions.
Yon describes the current situation as not random but as a crisis structure prepared over years. He speaks of targeted attacks or constraints affecting key systems such as energy pipelines, fertilizer production, and agricultural inputs. He calls food a “weapon” and argues that restrictions on energy and fertilizer could cause food production to collapse. He says a simultaneous disruption of multiple routes—including Suez, Panama, and Hormuz—would be especially dangerous because it could trigger not just regional shortages but systemic failure; in his view, the onset of famines is already foreseeable.
Later, Yon links the expected resource scarcity to military escalation and claims wars could be used as a means to “exhaust” populations. He raises the possibility of heavy losses among young Americans and an expansion of conscription measures, and says that if drafted he would be more likely to evade it. He bases this on the belief that the trajectory leads not to defense but to destruction.
As the core of his warning, Yon describes the social consequences of a large-scale famine. He says hunger is often more devastating than war because it simultaneously undermines order, infrastructure, and moral norms, and because in a widespread crisis there is scarcely anywhere to escape. Under true scarcity, he says behavior changes quickly, communities fracture, violence rises, and survival becomes the dominant priority. He uses the image of “human osmotic pressure,” in which large populations move toward the remaining resources, weakening borders, overwhelming systems, and eroding stability.
Source: The Vigilant Fox