What to Buy to Prepare for Food Shortages

Sugar

The first thing to buy is sugar. I've noticed that Asda increased its price of sugar. Lidl used to be the cheapest with the home bargains.

Well, I popped into there today, and although Lidl was relatively high in stock at the moment, the price had gone up to 95p ($1.14), so it's gone up by 20 pence ($0.24) since last week when I went shopping.

Every time you see price increases, something is coming, and there are problems.

Doing research online, Brazil is one of the leading suppliers of sugar, and because of the drought they had in many countries, their sugar exports were reduced by 25%.

However, also because of the crisis in the economy, they decided to cancel the contracts to support sugar sales and put the sugar into ethanol production.

Now I think what's happening is that whatever the supermarkets have, they will probably get contracts from different countries.

So if you like preserving, making jams, or anything, that's certainly something you might already stockpile. I'm sure this sugar will be going up a lot more beginning next year.

I make and preserve a lot of jams. I don't buy jams at all, so we buy sugar. I usually buy my sugar at the beginning of the season because I don't see the point of sitting on a lot of sugar. Now things are changing, and I know by the time next season comes to make jams, I'm

I chose to pop in there, and I've got 10 kilos of sugar (2.2 lbs). If you do jams, you know that this will only last you about two or three batches of jams.

Rice

I've been struggling to get rice in Lidl, although I picked up a few today. They haven't had a huge amount. Again, the shop was well stocked with the tins, but cheap things, like rice, were not. We have China and India as the leading suppliers of rice.

Apparently, China said they're going to limit the amount of rice that they will be exporting to different countries because they want to make sure that the people in China get enough supply of rice.

With the current economy, China will limit food shipments, and food shortages will continue.

That means that the shortage of rice is imminent. Get your rice. We have, I reckon, about two months before we're going to see empty shelves of the cheap stuff.

Tuna

Research published online for the past six months said that people are buying more meat and fish in tins because of the economic and the cost of living crisis.

Apparently, the tinned tuna sales increased in six months by 39%. Those were the expensive brands. I bought my tuna in Lidl for 55 pence ($0.66), and there was no cheap tuna in Farm Foods. So it's definitely going.

I do apologize for all of you tuna snobs; if you only buy a John West, I think Cambridge's price is £2.50 ($3), I believe, for four. And at the moment, Amazon is £3 ($3.60) for four. If you do subscribe and save, you get 15% off if you can have five products delivered at the same time.

So I've got myself 20 packs of four, and I had my 15% discount. It works out to 60-something pence ($0.72) per can of tuna, which is reasonable considering it's a branded tuna.

Another thing is the fact if you shop on Amazon, they deliver it to your door. Amazon has enormous stock, so you don't have to worry about it.

I have a lot of tuna coming, and I think I'm pretty happy because with the way things are going, give it a couple of months, and it will certainly be going up in price a lot.

Also, because of the increased demand and high cost of production, we are heading for a lack of tuna in 2026. I'm not talking about tin tuna; I'm talking about actual tuna fishing.

They're saying if we keep consuming tuna fish and tin fish at the rate that we are and fishing it at the rate that we are, by 2026, there will be no tuna left.

What to buy to prepare for food shortages

Those three items are what to buy to prepare for the food shortage. There are reasons behind the prices increase, and there will be reasons behind why those things will not be available very soon.

Are you stockpiling for food shortages? Share your plan in the comments below.