“And when he opened the third seal, I heard the third living being say, ‘Come!’ And I watched, and behold a black horse; its rider was holding a pair of scales in his hand. And I heard something like a voice in the middle of the four living beings saying, ‘A measure of wheat for a day’s wage, and three measures of barley for a day’s wage. And do not harm the oil and the wine.'”
The Apocalypse 6.5-6

This is not exactly a prediction of a global food shortage, it is more a prediction of an exorbitantly high cost of food. It speaks also of a tremendous disparity between the rich and the poor: while some people on the globe wrestle to buy enough grain to make a loaf of bread, others continue to enjoy “oil and wine,” the luxurious fare of the wealthy.

In the United States, Canada, and much of the developed world, the cost of food has in general risen in step with inflation for the past 100 years. While to shoppers it might feel that the cost of food has risen dramatically, the fact is that food continues to consume an equal or even smaller percentage of household income as previously. There have been temporary times of exception when food prices have spiked, but such periods have not been lasting.

However, millions of people in the developing nations face a completely different reality. Inflation in the developing world has most often been much higher, even extremely higher. When your daily income is less than $1.25 per family, and you are already spending virtually every cent you have on food, what happens when your money loses its value or if the global price of food suddenly spikes?

Take, for example, sub-Saharan Africa. Blomberg Business reports that long term, significant drought is radically intensifying the problem of hunger for the poor there. They note that while “failing corn crops expand hunger risk across sub-Sahara region, [the] global grain glut [is] no help: Weak currencies make imports costly.” The problem is not the global supply of food, it is the cost of food, resulting in the inability of the poor to get access to it.

While efforts are constantly being made to address such circumstances through the FAO (The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN) and international aid, inaccessibility to adequate food supply continues to be very much the reality for millions of people. Spikes in the cost of food exacerbate this problem.

What impact does this have on our world? Following the spike in the cost of food spike in 2008, Lester R. Brown, a prominent thinker about global phenomena, connected the problem of hunger to the status of international, global security, in an article published by Scientific American. Here is a brief quote:

States fail when national governments can no longer provide personal security, food security and basic social services such as education and health care. They often lose control of part or all of their territory. When governments lose their monopoly on power, law and order begin to disintegrate. After a point, countries can become so dangerous that food relief workers are no longer safe and their programs are halted; in Somalia and Afghanistan, deteriorating conditions have already put such programs in jeopardy.
Failing states are of international concern because they are a source of terrorists, drugs, weapons and refugees, threatening political stability everywhere. Somalia, number one on the 2008 list of failing states, has become a base for piracy. Iraq, number five, is a hotbed for terrorist training. Afghanistan, number seven, is the world’s leading supplier of heroin. Following the massive genocide of 1994 in Rwanda, refugees from that troubled state, thousands of armed soldiers among them, helped to destabilize neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo.

More recently, in 2024 we are watching the example of Haiti collapsing into anarchy because of extreme poverty. We are seeing increasingly intense waves of attempted migration from poor to well-resourced countries. Who can blame people for risking everything for the sake of finding food?

Is the problem of the cost of food a momentary problem that the international community will successfully bring to an end? Or is the earth quaking under the hooves of the black horse of the Apocalypse, warning us that we are coming to the end of security as we know it, and that things are changing? 

Jim’s talk entitled, “Big Change Coming,” explores this and other prophecies that tell us what the world will look just before the return of Jesus.