There has been no global shortages int eh last couple of years and there is no shortage presently, or even in the short run. Reserves are up from a few years ago and production is well in excess of need and should, barring unforeseen circumstances, remain well above need even as there remains the expected checkered pattern of droughts, floods, blight, and all the rest of the usual causes of failure.

That said the longer term, thirty years and beyond, looks clouded, if not outright bleak. Anthropogenic global warming, AGW, is pushing rising oceans and climatic shifts that are converting many of the best crop lands into saltwater swamps and deserts.

Then there are the many forms of biological blow-back as insects once under control become resistant to insecticides, herbicides no longer work on weeds, fungus laugh at the fungicides we throw at it, and antibiotics, necessary for industrial scale meat and egg production, loose traction.

Then there is the energy side of the issue. Industrial farming is energy intensive to start with. Most of the fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides, are made from fossil fuels and require motor fuels to ship and apply.

On the other end of the equation human populations are going up. Even worse billions of people who barely used motor fuels and fed themselves on a handful of rice and a few vegetables want to drive a car to work, eat burgers and fries, run big screen TVs and air conditioning, and flush a porcelain toilet with drinking water. They want to live like we do and, as Lincoln said 'There aren't enough teats on the sow'.

Water, fuel, and arable land are in short supply. Water used for crops can't be used for drinking, and neither can be routed to wetland. If the wetlands run dry fish populations in the oceans plummet. With many populations getting a good share of their protein from the oceans so shortchanging the wetlands to irrigate crops may end up yielding less food, not more.

This is typical of these issues. Easy answers will cause more harm than good. There are no simple solutions. Good solutions are only going to be implemented by understanding the situation and its dynamics, science, and sitting down and negotiating like adults, politics.

Not making any of it any easier is the fact that for thirty years there has been a concerted effort to discredit both science and politics. So we have largely crippled our ability to know reality and take action collectively.

There is good news. None of these very ponderous and vicious birds will come home to roost for thirty years and they won't bite hard for another forty. So there may be time on some of these issues but how you navigate all this without information and collective action is a mystery.

Storing food and growing a garden is barely a drop in the bucket. It might help some but it is clearly not an answer. Good luck. IMO there is little to nothing an individual, or small group, can do. These are national and global issues that are amenable only to national and global scale solutions.

There is one small fact that I take great comfort in: In forty years I will either be dead or so old that it won't matter. All the young bucks out there who claim to know it all and have easy answers better be right. You have thirty or forty years to come together and get it right.