The United Nations spent Friday arguing about a map. Not about mines in the Strait of Hormuz. Not about failed states, famine, or the next round of empty peacekeeping resolutions. A map.
On September 4, the General Assembly adopted a Togo-sponsored text called “Correct the Map,” backing the 2018 Equal Earth projection over the familiar Mercator chart that sailors have used since 1569. The tally was 164 in favor, one against, and six abstentions. The lone no vote belonged to the United States. Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia, and Ukraine sat it out.
Washington did not pretend this was a civics lesson about Greenland. Deputy U.S. representative to ECOSOC Yaryna Ferencevych said the resolution was dressed up as “an anodyne effort to update cartographic proportions” and was, in fact, part of “a much larger and more radical ideological project.”
Instead of focusing on genuine problems of international peace, prosperity, or good relations, this body is debating map projects from the 16th century and their role in promoting reparations and cognitive justice.
Then the line that should be carved over the visitors’ entrance on First Avenue. “Resolutions like this one and the ideological agenda they promote are barnacles on our work here and the reason this institution is losing its credibility.”
Africa Is Large. That Is Not the Fight.
Africa is enormous. Anyone who has stood in front of a globe already knew it. On a Mercator wall map, Greenland can look like a peer of the continent. In real acreage, Africa is about fourteen times larger. That distortion is not a secret cabal. Gerardus Mercator built the 1569 projection so a compass course would plot as a straight line.
Cartographers have been complaining about the stretch near the poles for a century. Google revived a Web Mercator variant in 2005 because it pans and zooms without tearing the screen in half. Utility, not theology.
Equal Earth, drawn in 2018 by Bojan Šavrič, Bernhard Jenny, and Tom Patterson, keeps land area closer to true scale and still looks like a world map instead of a peeled orange. Fine. Print it. Hang it in a classroom. Nobody in America is required to pretend Greenland is the size of Algeria.
The resolution does not ban Mercator. It does something slipperier. It plants the United Nations’ official blessing on equal-area maps as the preferred picture of the planet and invites governments, schools, agencies, and tech firms to fall in line. France, according to reporting carried by Breitbart, announced it would abandon Mercator the same day. That is how a “nonbinding” vote becomes tomorrow’s textbook.
Cognitive Justice Is Not Cartography
Read the text, not the press release. The resolution treats old map distortions as “historical biases” with cognitive, educational, cultural, geopolitical, and socioeconomic effects. Correcting them, it says, will promote recognition, justice, and development, “particularly with regard to the African continent.”
Campaign language and allied statements call the whole project an act of “cognitive justice” and “memorial reparation.”
That is the tell. The earth did not shrink Africa. A Flemish mapmaker optimized a chart for ships. Turning that fact into a morality play about colonial vision is how you smuggle reparations talk into a cartography vote. Togo Foreign Minister Robert Dussey, introducing the measure for the African Group, offered the soft version.
A fair map does not change the geography of the world; it changes how we see the world. And when our perspective becomes more just, it paves the way for greater understanding, respect and peace among nations.
Peace from a projection. If only it worked that way in Sudan, the Sahel, or the Horn. The same week African and Caribbean leaders have been pressing for payments, debt cancellation, and formal apologies over slavery, the General Assembly decided the urgent work of nations was which silhouette children should memorize. The map is the sermon. The collection plate comes later.
And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.
God set the bounds. A committee in Turtle Bay does not unsay them by preferring one equal-area formula over another. Size on paper never made a people free, honest, or prosperous. Bad government, tribal war, corruption, and the cult of grievance have done more to shrink Africa’s future than Gerardus Mercator ever did.
The Lonely Vote Was the Honest One
India voted yes and still felt the need to say the resolution should be read as support for equal-area maps in general, not a canonization of Equal Earth itself. Even the amen corner knows a single official picture of the world is a political instrument. The United States simply said the quiet part in public.
A body that cannot keep peace, cannot keep its books, and cannot keep member states from treating the Charter like optional reading now wants to supervise how the continents look on a poster.
That is not science class. That is the same instinct that turns every Western artifact into an indictment and every African statistic into someone else’s original sin.
Draw a better map if you want one. Teach children that the globe is not a rectangle. Then go back to work that matters. The earth is already the size God made it. No vote in New York will change that, and no new projection will pay a ransom for the past.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
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The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
