Economic chaos underway, consumers see it, the numbers tell the story.

 

There are fewer ships on the oceans today than a couple of months ago, a disturbing data point on the economy.

That’s thanks to the U.S. Administration’s chaotic tariff posture.

It seems clear that in the coming weeks, the Administration’s turbulent economic posture  will translate to significantly higher prices. And also dramatically less inventory available to American consumers.

Consumers see it coming. Consumer sentiment has dropped to a historic low.

The value of the U.S. dollar against foreign currencies has dropped, meaning everything we buy from aboard costs more, and when we travel, our money buys less. 

Investors Business Daily has a report today that China-to-North American shipping cancellations have reached 50%. 

Right now, container unloading in U.S. ports is higher than normal, due to a rush of advance orders meant to beat the tariffs. But the coming drop in shipping arrivals will far outpace the temporary increase.

“Major ports like Los Angeles and Long Beach have recently seen increased activity as companies rushed goods before new tariffs. However, forward bookings indicate falling demand,” reports the British firm Containerlift. 

Those kinds of drops in cargo volume will economically hit American ports, trucking companies and trains before they impact store shelves and eventually consumers.

It is not just imports to the U.S., but also exports from the U.S. American farmers are hit extremely hard. In the week of April 11-17, according to the USDA, pork exports were down 72%, soy down 50%, corn down 26%, cotton down 49%, beef down 41%. A few exports (rice, sorghum) were up, but the trend was way down.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) anticipates by the end of the year a 12.6% drop in North American exports.

U.S. manufacturing is down, and there are thousands of layoffs at manufacturing plants.

None of this is good for our country.

But other countries will continue to trade with each other without the direct impact of the American trade tariffs. That’s why, although the global economy is expected to be hit by the American trade chaos, it will be hit far less severely than the U.S. and its biggest direct trading partners.

The WTO is estimating worldwide merchandise trade to take just a .2% hit. 

© Jan TenBruggencate 2025

Food safety in U.S. at risk from draconian budget and staff cuts

 The United States has the safest food in the world, but maybe not for long.

Massive cuts in the agencies that oversee the healthiness of our grocery store products are threatening the nation.

Food safety has long been protected by four major government offices: the DHHS’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Department of Commerce’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS). Those agencies work together under dozens of interagency agreements to keep our groceries safe.

Food safety includes far more than just looking for toxic compounds and disease agents in food. There is safe packaging, sanitation in processing plants, pesticide residue testing, animal drug guidance, animal carcass inspections, checking for contamination from insect parts, all kinds of things.

State and local health departments play a role, but that role is widely different in differing jurisdictions. One of the main functions of those local authorities, often working with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is investigating outbreaks after the food safety system has failed. Outbreaks like communicable diseases and foodborne pathogens like Salmonella, Shigella, Campylobacter, and E. coli

The broad consistent protections of the food supply come from the actions of the national government.

And the federal government is actively in the process of abandoning the safety of our food supply.

An April 10 White House memo disclosed plans to cut 40% from the budgets of the CDC and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). 

The DHHS is facing $40 Billion in cuts, a third of its discretionary budget. /

 Staffing cuts have already significantly cut services, and the FDA just announced that it will stop testing milk.

And the Administration laid off bird flu investigators at the FDA, while they were working on an active and spreading bird flu virus.

The EPA has been charged with cutting its budget 65 percent, although EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin says the environment will be protected even with the cuts. 

NOAA has been told to cut its budget 25 percent, and the NMFS (NOAA Fisheries) is looking at 28 percent.

A leaked White House document says FDA won’t be inspecting food processing any more, but that states will cover that under contracts from the FDA. 

"The budget eliminates FDA's direct role in routine inspections of food facilities," says the document. "FDA will expand the current state contracts for routine food facility inspections program to cover 100 percent of all routine foods."

But with the giant budget cuts, it is not clear from where will come the money to pay the states to do that.

Indeed, it is not clear how we can keep American food safe by cutting tens of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of jobs out of our food safety programs.

In a current case, a warning of slivers of metal in pork carnitas, it wasn’t government inspectors that discovered it. The FSIS put out the warning after the factory processing the carnitas identified the problem.

In another current crisis, there are four major listeria outbreaks underway right now, with more than 120 people sick at a dozen dead. That would be the FDA and the CDC, both of which are undergoing or facing severe staff reductions.

Food safety seems like something we’d want to support.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2025

More and worse than ever: World Meteorological Organization new climate report

 There are those—some of them in our nation’s leadership—who still deny climate science.

It’s a little like rejecting the rain forecast when the flood is already up to your knees.

The World Meteorological Organization just issued its State of the Climate report. It is no longer about predictions, because the predictions of past decades are all now coming to pass.

 Here is the WMO press release about the report. 

Here is the actual WMO report. 

World atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels are the highest they have been in 800,000 years, and so are its fellow greenhouse gases methan and nitrous oxide.

Global surface temperatures are the highest they have been since records have been kept. Last year was the single hottest year on record, and the past decade is the single hottest decade on record. And it continues. January 2025 was the hottest January on record.

The oceans, which store massive amounts of heat, are hotter than ever. Each of the past eight years has been the hottest. Oceans take up 90% of the heat rise that is driven by greenhouse gas increases. Without the oceans taking up heat, the atmospheric temperatures would be even higher.

In part because of the heat, sea levels are rising faster than ever—both because warmer water takes up more volume and because glaciers are melting their stored water back into the sea.

The ocean is acidifying at a record pace—and changing the chemistry of the oceans will have significant effects. Says WMO: “The effects of ocean acidification on habitat area, biodiversity and ecosystems have already been clearly observed, and food production from shellfish aquaculture and fisheries has been hit as have coral reefs.”

All that warming and its impacts lead to weather disruptions, and the report says that extreme weather events in 2024 led to the highest level of human disruptions on record.

It takes all kinds of forms. One of them, for Hawai`i residents, is an ongoing drought that has produced the lowest stream flows since we started keeping records more than a century ago.

 The changes in climate also lead to reductions in food and fishery production, driving food insecurity on a global scale.

The severity of the climate disruption is such that the WMO is now more about responding to the chaos than stopping it. In the foreword to the report, WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said this:

“WMO and the global community are intensifying efforts to strengthen early warning systems and climate services to help decision-makers and society at large be more resilient to extreme weather and climate. We are making progress but need to go further and need to go faster. Only half of all countries worldwide have adequate multi-hazard early warning systems. This must change.”

The World Meteorological Organization is a non-governmental international organizatioTn founded as a place where international researchers could share data. It was created in 1950, but is rooted in the International Meteorological Organization, which dates back to 1873.

It is not just WMO reporting this.

Here is NOAA’s report: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/monthly-report/global/202413

And here is the European Union’s Copernicus Program report: https://climate.copernicus.eu/global-climate-highlights-2024

 

© Jan TenBruggencate 2025