(Just The News)—Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and her delegation spent more than $200,000 on an eight-day trip to Asia in September, averaging $26,000 per day.
This is according to records obtained by The Center Square through a Freedom of Information Act request filed with the Michigan Economic Development Corp..
The MEDC and the Michigan Economic Development Foundation, an independent, nonprofit organization, “supported” the trip, according to the governor’s office.
In total, the trip cost $91,000 for airfare, nearly $70,000 for hotel accommodations, $13,000 for conference rooms and events, $11,000 for ground transportation, and $6,000 for meals. Other miscellaneous expenses included photographer fees, interpretation services, and $3,200 for a “cultural activity.”
Whitmer argued the trip to South Korea and Taiwan was critical for the state’s business relations.
“Michigan and Taiwan are both places where people know how to make things, solve tough problems, and build the technologies that will define our future,” Whitmer said. “We’re going anywhere and working with anyone to bring more jobs, investments, and opportunity back home to Michigan.”
As previously reported on by The Center Square, Republicans have criticized Whitmer’s international travels.
Earlier this year, the governor took a week-long trip to Europe, spending approximately $180,000. That came after a $61,000 January trip to Switzerland.
Whitmer’s office defended her Asia trip for “building on strong partnership to bring jobs and investment to Michigan.”
The trip began in South Korea, with day one including a “cultural walking tour” of “traditional Korean homes” and a local shopping district. This is according to the official itinerary shared with The Center Square via the records request.
The rest of the time in South Korea included meetings with Korean companies that have recently invested in Michigan and meetings with government officials.
“Investment missions allow Team Michigan to build the trust that turn conversations into opportunities for Michigan’s people, communities, and businesses,” said Quentin L. Messer, Jr., CEO of MEDC, who joined Whitmer on the trip. “During this mission, we deepened relationships with companies already investing in Michigan while positioning our state to compete for future investment.”
After three nights in South Korea, the delegation flew to Taiwan, where members met with President Lai Ching-te, government officials, and representatives of semiconductor, drone, and robotics companies.
“Michigan is a global hub of the automotive industry, excelling in smart mobility, automotive software, information and communications technology, and industrial automation, which are highly complementary with Taiwan’s semiconductor, electronic components, and smart manufacturing industries,” said Ching-te. “As a result, an increasing number of Taiwanese enterprises are investing and expanding their presence in Michigan . . . I anticipate that the governor’s visit will bring about more Taiwan-US industrial cooperation, so that together we can enhance supply chain resilience and reinforce each other’s technological and industrial security.”
The trip marked Whitmer’s third visit to Taiwan in three years. She was accompanied by a delegation of more than a dozen people. Those included eight officials from MEDC, two from the governor’s office, and:
- David Coulter, county executive of Oakland County
- Paul Rogers, the adjunct general of the Michigan National Guard
- Charles Marshall, II, president of ITC Michigan
- Marc Corriveau, Sr. vice president & chief government relations officer at Henry Ford Health System
Whitmer applauded the trip as a success.
“Michigan is competing on the global stage, and the best way to win is to build relationships and make sure companies know what we bring to the table,” Whitmer said. “In South Korea and Taiwan, we deepened our relationships with companies already creating good-paying jobs in Michigan, and showed others considering where to make their next investment why our state is the best place to build the future.”
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.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
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.
