World News

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.

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:

"In the worst case, this means lower yields and crop failures next season. In the best case, higher input costs will be included in food prices next year."

Crop failures and lower yields are both very very bad to be happening globally.

Even pre-modern famines do not typically result in seed grain being eaten up.

Nobody said anything about seed grain being used up, what are you talking about?

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.

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.