this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
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A famine is not the concern here - or at least not a serious one. Increased government spending in subsidies, or increased debt burden on farming firms, is.
That's not how famines work.
Please do explain how famines aren’t the result of decreased food output.
As explained in the first two sentences, the fundamental issue being created here is of increased cost of fertilizer which will require subsidizing by government or farms taking on more debt - something acknowledged in the article itself.
Even pre-modern famines do not typically result in seed grain being eaten up.
Famines are not simply 'decreased food output', but require a massive drop in food output without any ability to meaningfully make substitutions from other sources. including storage. Assuming no substitution and all fertilizer instantly disappears from the market, totally unused in agriculture for the next year, you're only looking at yield drops of ~20% - in a society that wastes hundreds-of-millions-to-billions of tons of crops, spits a similar amount into uses like biofuel and raising animals for slaughter, and spends billions of dollars paying farmers not to use land in order to artificially keep crop prices high.
We live in a highly integrated global market wherein the only famines that have happened in the past 50 years have been predicated on widespread societal breakdown in the countries more than poor yields. For that matter, they also are pretty universally accompanied by a lack of serious action on the part of the global community to alleviate the issues in the global market, since the issue is localized rather than general, and governments are fucking great at ignoring anything that doesn't affect them directly. Short of mismanagement of a grotesque and absurd level on an internationally coordinated scale, the chance of this evoking famine conditions are pretty low.
You’ve misread. This sentence you are referring to “The fertilizer shortage is putting the livelihood of farmers in developing countries — already troubled by rising temperatures and erratic weather systems — further at risk, and could lead to people everywhere paying more for food” is talking about the costs from a lowering of supply, not from things just “getting more expensive”. Later in the article:
Crop failures and lower yields are both very very bad to be happening globally.
Nobody said anything about seed grain being used up, what are you talking about?
So…. Exactly what is happening right now then?
Why are you bringing these things up anyway? I was commenting on your comment that stated we should be doing crop rotation. Crop rotation doesn’t work unless you’ve been doing it for years, if we have crop failures and shortages, we will be unable to start crop rotation. It’s a solution that won’t work at all unless we started a decade ago. If there are global crop failures then we wont have nutrients in the soil to even make rotation a possibility.
No, the issue I'm referring to is the broader issue addressed by most of the fucking article, the increased expense of fertilizer, the direct issue which is being discussed and does not have a serious possibility of leading to widespread famine.
"Global market prices going up is widespread society breakdown on the regional level."
Yes. You got it in one. Brilliant.
Then why the fuck do you think that crop rotation would be impossi-
Oh, Jesus fucking Christ.