Author Topic: PanFa War; Supply Chain, and Sabotage of Food Supply  (Read 31934 times)



G M

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Crafty_Dog

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Implications of Chinese Lockdown
« Reply #53 on: May 02, 2022, 09:49:07 AM »
China’s Lockdowns of Tens of Millions Inflicts More Pain on Global Supply Chains
By Dorothy Li May 1, 2022 Updated: May 2, 2022biggersmaller Print

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Seeing China’s financial hub Shanghai, home to 25 million, come to a standstill amid more than four weeks of lockdown has made those in Beijing nervous. The capital city has detected growing COVID-19 outbreaks and has rushed to conduct mass testing in a bid to contain the virus.

Almost all 22 million inhabitants in Beijing completed three rounds of testing on April 30. The results may determine whether they will be destined to experience the same fate as those in Shanghai, where fenced-up people have been banging pans on their balconies at night to protest a month-long lockdown.

Shoppers in Beijing have rushed to stock up on food, just in case. Officials have closed schools, without specifying a reopening date, and more venues. Workers have set up blue metal barriers around residential blocks where infections have been recorded. A sign placed outside such a residential complex read, “Entry only. No exit.”

The scenes in Beijing are reminiscent of other Chinese cities battling the fast-moving Omicron variant. As the Chinese regime appears determined to contain the outbreak under its heavy-handed “zero-COVID” policy, lockdowns and mass testing—and the well-documented suffering that it causes—are likely to remain commonplace.

As of April 28, at least 26 cities across the country are currently in partial or full lockdown, covering some 78 million people, according to calculations by The Epoch Times based on notices by local authorities. These cities range from northern Baotou, a major supplier of rare earths, to eastern Yiwu, an export center that produces everything from Christmas trees to presidential campaign merchandise.

Epoch Times Photo
A bicycle is parked in front of a barricaded fence of a locked-down residential complex in Beijing on April 29, 2022. (Andy Wong/AP Photo)
Those living in areas not under lockdown still face restrictions. The tech hub Hangzhou is testing its residents every 48 hours. About 12.2 million students and workers must provide proof of negative results if they want to take public transportation and enter schools or offices. Similar measures will be effective in Beijing after May 5, with officials at an April 30 briefing calling it “normalized nucleic acid tests.”

Foreigners Flee

The Chinese regime’s relentless zero-COVID fight has forced foreigners to rethink their lives in the international financial hub of Shanghai. The month-long closure of the city, home to numerous multinational firms, has left even white-collar professionals struggling with food shortage issues.


While many are allowed to walk around in their neighborhood now, concerns about being taken into quarantine remain. The city’s 25 million people will continue to take more tests until May 7, local officials said at a May 1 press conference. A positive result means separation from families and living in crowded quarantine facilities, with 24-hour lights and no hot water.

“Until the lockdown, I really couldn’t feel the authoritarian government, because you’re more or less free to do what you want,” said Jennifer Li, a foreigner who is making plans for her family to leave the city that has been their home for 11 years.

The regimes’ handling of COVID-19 “made us realize how human lives and human mental health is not important to this government,” she added.

The European Chamber of Commerce recently warned that the “number of foreigners in China have halved since the pandemic began and could halve again this summer.”

Economic Toll

The strict restrictions are also crushing economic activity. The gauge of manufacturing activity contracted at a steeper pace in April, reaching the lowest point since February 2020, when lockdowns halted industrial production and disrupted supply chains for the first time.

The official manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) fell to 47.4 in April from 49.5 in March, offering a first glimpse into the economic pain inflicted by lockdown measures.

Analysts from several investment banks have further cut their forecasts for the country’s economic growth rate as the lockdown in Shanghai drags on. The lowest is from Nomura, with a prediction of 3.9 percent, down from 4.3 percent previously, well below the official target of a 5.5 percent increase.


In a worst-case scenario, “China can expect a decrease in GDP by 53 percent if all cities are forced into lockdown,” Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow of global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, told an April 26 virtual panel.

China’s yuan currency fell more than 4 percent in April, its biggest monthly drop in 28 years, while its stock markets have been the second-worst performers this year after sanctions-hit Russia.

The slowdown is likely to weigh on global recovery as the lockdown will hurt companies’ sales in China and ripple through the supply chain, said professor Yen Huai-Shing, deputy director of the Taiwan Chung Hua Institution for Economic Research.

Supply Chain Woes

Carmakers and phones are experiencing shortages of components sourced in China. The United States imports close to 18 percent of all products from China and 33 percent of electronics, according to official data.

U.S. giants, including Apple and Microsoft, have warned that China’s lockdowns have intensified global supply chain disruption and raises uncertainty about their business outlook.

A main source of the supply chain troubles has been from severe delays in transportation: frequent COVID-19 testing has disrupted the work of truckers and port workers. “Once the lockdown is lifted and economic activity once again springs to life, a pileup of products from accumulated orders will surge into the United States,” Sara Hsu, a clinical associate professor of supply chain management at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville wrote in The Diplomat. This means that the backlogs that Los Angeles and Long Beach ports experienced last year will happen again, she added.

Yen doesn’t see the supply chain disruptions ending soon.

“[China’s] COVID lockdown brings more uncertainty to foreign investors and damage to their confidence,” Yen told The Epoch Times.

She suggested that multinational companies should consider relocating their supply chain elsewhere. Some firms in the semiconductor hub of Taiwan have already started diversifying supply chains since 2018 during the U.S.-China trade war, Yen noted.

Unwavering in Zero-COVID

As zero-COVID batters the country’s economy, Chinese leader Xi Jinping on April 29 announced an infrastructure push to boost demand, a method Beijing used during the global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009 that created a mountain of debt. However, he didn’t provide key details including the amount of spending and the specific timeframe.


Still, Xi, who is seeking an unprecedented third five-year term in office this autumn, showed no sign of changing the course at Friday’s meeting of the 25-member Politburo, the center of power within the Chinese Communist Party led by Xi.

The leadership called for the country to “persist with dynamic zero,” according to the meeting summary released by the official Xinhua news agency, referring to another name of zero-COVID.

“For now, China is not getting out of the corner the president [Xi Jinping] has maneuvered the country into,” Joerg Wuttke, president of the EU Chamber of Commerce in China, told Swiss media outlet Market NZZ.

“They are prisoners of their own narrative. “It’s rather tragic: China was the first to get into the pandemic, and it’s the last to get out. And in the meantime, they’ve been telling the whole world that they’re the best.”

Luo Ya and Reuters contributed to the report.

Crafty_Dog

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Chill pill from NRO
« Reply #55 on: May 06, 2022, 07:39:39 AM »
What’s Really Going On with These Food-Facility Fires?

We made it to Friday! First, with two small planes crashing into or near food-processing plants, and reports of fires at various food-processing plants and facilities, it’s fair to wonder if something sinister is going on, but the evidence is pointing in one clear direction; I would sincerely love it if unnamed “senior U.S. officials” would just shut up about how we’re helping the Ukrainians kill lots of Russian soldiers; and if you think filling up your tank with regular gasoline is painful these days, don’t look at the price of diesel — and I don’t mean Vin.

What’s Really Going on With Food-Processing-Plant Fires

In a typical year, how many planes crash into food-processing plants?

You’d figure the answer would be “zero,” and in a bad year, maybe get all the way up to “one.” This year, we’re up to two so far — or more specifically, one crash into a plant, one crash about 300 yards from one.

April 14:

A plane crashed into an Idaho potato and food processing plant, killing the pilot, police said. It hit Gem State Processing in Heyburn in East Idaho at about 8:35 a.m. on Wednesday, city police said. The pilot was the only person in the plane and died during the crash, police said. None of the employees at the processing plant were injured.

April 22:

Covington [Georgia] firefighters responded to a plane crash that killed two people Thursday at the General Mills food processing plant. The small plane crashed apparently after taking off from the runway of the Covington Municipal Airport. Six tractor-trailers were damaged as a result of the crash. Both occupants of the plane died. However, the local officials were grateful that the plane did not strike the plant building, which could have resulted in greater loss of life.

Two plane crashes near food-processing plants in eight days is indeed a weird coincidence, and some folks on the Internet — and Tucker Carlson — started noticing other news reports about other fires at other food-processing plants:

February 5: A “massive fire swept through Wisconsin River Meats in Mauston on Thursday, destroying part of the facility.”
February 22: “The Shearer’s Foods plant in Hermiston, Oregon caught fire after a propane boiler exploded.”
March 17: “A structure fire at the Walmart Distribution Center in Plainfield, Indiana broke out about noon on Wednesday. About 1,000 employees were inside but none were injured, officials say. One firefighter suffered minor injuries.”
March 22: “A fire that broke out at a Nestle Hot Pockets plant in Jonesboro, Arkansas on March 16 had the facility still closed as of March 21.”
March 25: “Officials believe a deep-frying machine is behind the fire that destroyed a potato processing facility in Belfast.”
April 13: “Firefighters from several departments in Maine helped battle a massive fire that destroyed a butcher shop and meat market in Center Conway, New Hampshire.”
April 30: A soybean-processing tank caught fire at the Perdue Farms plant in Chesapeake, Va.
So, what’s going on? Is this a nefarious conspiracy of arsonists, terrorists, or foreign agents? At this point, there’s no evidence of that and no reason to think it is the case.

For starters, not all the fires or crashes did significant damage. In the Chesapeake soybean-facility fire, a plant manager said that the fire will have little to no impact on their operations. In the Georgia crash, the plane didn’t hit the building, no employees were harmed, and General Mills spokesperson Mollie Wulff said, “The plant did not experience any disruptions and it remains fully operational.” The pilot in that crash was identified as a student pilot, and the other person was a flight instructor — with no signs of terrorism and no signs of ties to a hostile foreign government.

Second, none of the fires so far have been declared cases of arson. If we had confirmed or likely cases of arson at food-processing facilities from coast to coast, then yes, this would indeed be suspicious. (I know, I know, the Cigarette-Smoking Man showed up and covered it up.) But in any given year, there are a half-million fires reported to local fire departments, and about 5,300 of them are in “manufacturing or processing” facilities. That comes out to about 440 per month, and if there are fires in 440 manufacturing or processing facilities a month from coast to coast, we would expect at least a handful each month to be at food-processing facilities. In fact, the list above stretches the definition of food-processing facilities, because the Walmart Distribution Center also stored clothes and cardboard, and the New Hampshire fire happened at a butcher shop.

Third, if you were a terrorist or foreign agent attempting to choke off the American food-distribution network . . . would you start with an obscure potato-chip maker in Oregon? Then move on to the source of Hot Pockets in Arkansas? Then move on to a soybean-processing tank in Virginia? Are these the right targets if you’re trying to cripple America?

If you were a nefarious terrorist group or hostile foreign power and you had not merely one suicide pilot, but two of them — and in the case of the Georgia crash, someone willing to ride along as a passenger — would you really aim for a potato-processing plant in southern Idaho and then the Georgia plant where they make Cinnamon Toast Crunch? Does this terrorist group just hate carbohydrates or something? Does Dr. Atkins have an alibi?

If you hated America and had the ability to crash two planes into separate targets . . . wouldn’t you pick something a little more high-profile? The last guys did!

How is this plan to attack and disrupt the U.S. food-supply chain going to work, anyway? As of 2017, the U.S. had 36,486 food- and beverage-processing establishments. Is the plan to pick them off, one by one, every two weeks or so?

What we’re likely experiencing is the “Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon,” a.k.a. “frequency illusion” — when you hear a term and then feel like you’re suddenly seeing it everywhere. In reality, whatever you’re observing is occurring at the same frequency, it’s just that you didn’t notice it or ignored it before.

Because of the empty shelves earlier this year, people are paying much closer attention to supply chains these days. During the pandemic, many of us experienced sudden disruptions to our usually steady supplies of many varieties of food, as some meatpacking plants briefly shut down because of Covid outbreaks, and potato growers found it harder to get their spuds to consumers. (There was also that hacker attack on a major beef supplier in early 2021.) Then in January, tens of millions of Americans caught the Omicron variant at the same time, leading to disruptions to shipments of all kinds of products, and thus empty shelves and product shortages across the country. And those supply-chain problems still haven’t been worked out.

Lots of Americans have become much more aware of all the steps between the creation of a particular good and when they purchase it, and just how many things can go wrong in between. (And just about everything can go wrong: The Felicity Ace, a cargo ship full of Porsches, Bentleys, and Lamborghinis, caught fire and sank to the bottom of the ocean in early March.) It is not surprising that something genuinely unusual — like two small planes crashing in or near two food-processing facilities in a short span of time — would catch people’s eyes and get them to start looking for a pattern.

But so far, with no evidence of foul play, this appears to be just another random set of fires in a country that has a lot more fires at industrial sites than we previously thought. The world has a genuine food-supply crisis, as discussed yesterday, and that is likely going to increase prices on certain foods here in America. But the higher food prices we are seeing are thankfully not occurring because of small plane crashes or fires across the country.

G M

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Our "Great Leap Forward"
« Reply #56 on: May 06, 2022, 08:16:37 AM »


Crafty_Dog

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Excellent real time data from a farmer
« Reply #58 on: May 06, 2022, 08:58:56 AM »
second post:

Recommended by MY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0RDGmwH45E

G M

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I had no idea it was this bad
« Reply #59 on: May 11, 2022, 01:59:42 PM »
« Last Edit: May 12, 2022, 07:22:06 AM by G M »

G M

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G M

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3rd-Worldification
« Reply #66 on: May 16, 2022, 07:48:59 AM »

Crafty_Dog

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G M

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Crafty_Dog

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CA Rice
« Reply #72 on: May 17, 2022, 05:17:27 AM »

G M

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Re: CA Rice and Vegas
« Reply #73 on: May 17, 2022, 07:55:55 AM »


Crafty_Dog

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Re: Supply chain issues; PanFa War
« Reply #75 on: May 17, 2022, 03:13:31 PM »
A recurring theme (hat tip to Michael Yon) popping up here is how events are triggering/causing mass migration.   Perhaps doing things to trigger this is a feature and not a bug?

G M

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Re: Supply chain issues; PanFa War
« Reply #76 on: May 17, 2022, 04:12:28 PM »
A recurring theme (hat tip to Michael Yon) popping up here is how events are triggering/causing mass migration.   Perhaps doing things to trigger this is a feature and not a bug?

The destruction of the US and the rest of the west is the plan. Cloward-Piven and then the great reset.



G M

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Re: MY: Sri Lanka and
« Reply #78 on: May 18, 2022, 07:41:48 AM »
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/2154181/sri-lanka-checkmate-fooled-into-going-organic-now-they-will-starve-to-death

"If USA runs out of fuel or suffers significant power outages, worse shall befall us. We are under attack. My estimate is there will be no real mid-term elections in United States. OGUS is making revolution and using energy and food as WMD just as Mao and Stalin did same, killing tens of millions."

Why would Michael Yon suggest that voting wasn't a viable option?


G M

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Out of food, out of fuel
« Reply #80 on: May 18, 2022, 10:20:35 AM »

ccp

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Biden big move baby formula
« Reply #81 on: May 18, 2022, 04:26:17 PM »
https://www.yahoo.com/news/biden-invokes-defense-production-act-220331456.html

screwing up prior to big election requires big moves.  :wink:

CNN hot on the story
WOLF with that serious face
  to tell us, with his chosen guests how bold this is.

Axel douche will be on
maybe Dana bash of Gloria borga
of course Sanjay

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G M

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Re: Another barely reported food fire
« Reply #85 on: May 19, 2022, 08:28:10 PM »
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/2161279/another-food-fire-barely-reported

The Beast is knocking out our energy such as diesel. No diesel come harvest = famine in United States. And no voting of course. No real voting.

The only way to avoid this kinetic fight is surrender to the ovens.


G M

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On the precipice
« Reply #87 on: May 21, 2022, 08:00:35 AM »

G M

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G M

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I was told the adults were in charge
« Reply #92 on: May 26, 2022, 06:54:21 AM »


G M

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Crafty_Dog

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Russian harvest looking good
« Reply #95 on: May 30, 2022, 03:10:33 AM »
Exceeding expectations. Russia’s Ministry of Agriculture said the country’s grain harvest in 2022 could significantly exceed last year’s. Russia expects to produce 130 million tons of grain, including 87 million tons of wheat, in 2022, compared to 120.7 million tons in 2021. It would be the largest harvest in Russian history.

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Re: Supply chain issues; PanFa War
« Reply #98 on: June 02, 2022, 03:00:27 AM »
I confess I wondered if the mass culling of chickens due to disease tempted someone with insurance , , ,

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« Last Edit: June 09, 2022, 05:52:20 AM by Crafty_Dog »