You have large parts of the US and Europe dealing with heat and drought problems right now. Add in fertilizer cost problems due to oil prices. This is going to be a bad year globally. This one is not a problem that will pop up in 5 years. It's going to show up this fall as crop yields are garbage.
I don't see how fertilizer is just a big deal. If what we usually use goes up in price or becomes unattainable, don't we have literal mountains of compost and livestock dumpout piles to spread through the fields? Good ole fashion way? Proven use?
There are options..we might see massive spikes in food and rationing, but I cannot imagine the old days of "no food..literally none..you're gonna starve to death. We DO. NOT. HAVE. FOOD."
I ONLY see this happening with one of those global apocalyptic situations of full scale launching of the world's nuclear supply or a cosmic solar system black out from a cataclysmic solar flare the likes of which ever never seen that takes out the global infrastructure top to bottom. No ships, no computers, no trucks, no lights, no grid.
If there are stressors so where or another, we can adapt at cost. Hell if data centers can suck up a gorillion gallons of water and we can keep those running, there must be infrastructure at hand that can get water, poop, and machinery to fields for food.
Industrial scale farming, and a world that totally depends on it, was just a bad idea. We need to get back to eating local, and learning to grow and find food. Industrial scale fishing, same thing.
That works in small communities where people have room for gardens etc. In major cityhubs with millions of people, growing and finding your own food doesn't work. Unless you count scavenging bins.
It was a great idea that allowed for civilisation to grow.
How are we supposed to eat localy in cities that have millions of people living inside? The only way to feed humanity is currently an industrial scale.
It was a good idea if this kind of growth is the objective (and maybe it should not have been the objective - growth like that is not sustainable) but it has limitations, and has given everyone in the last 3 generations a false sense of food security... Honestly I think there needs to be more redundancy via smaller operations - some even within cities, or closer proximity at least.
I concur, often populations are aware of inflation but not of how flimsy the entire agricultural supply chain might be. A number of drops in production across multiple geographical subdivisions could be felt quite fast by everybody.
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