The Looming Food Crisis

People who don't understand modern farming are making bad decisions about natural gas. ‘Farms Are Failing’ as Fertilizer Prices Drive Up Cost of Food

And while things will be more expensive in the US, there will probably be famine in other parts of the world.

You see natural gas is "bad" according to the tree-huggers. And fracking? Don't get them started on fracking! They don't see natural gas being used in the long chain of events that make modern agriculture possible. Maybe they will wake up when they can no longer get avocados for their toast. No, they will blame something else; their own policies are NEVER the problem.

Fertilizer demand in sub-Saharan Africa could fall 30% in 2022, according to the International Fertilizer Development Center, a global nonprofit organization. That would translate to 30 million metric tons less food produced, which the center says is equivalent to the food needs of 100 million people.

30 million tonnes of food, taken out of a system that already sees systemic hunger is a recipe for disaster, if ever there was one.

People in developing countries have been facing rising food prices - at double digit rates of inflation - for a couple of years. They are already not able to afford enough. As production falls, prices will rise, impacting the poor, rural areas.

As for the natural gas impact on all of this.

The price-increases stem partly from global energy costs, with the average natural-gas price in Europe for the October-December quarter 10 times as much as that for the year of 2020, according to World Bank data. Nitrogen production facilities rely heavily on natural gas to convert chemical raw materials into finished products, so rises in the natural-gas price often flow through into fertilizer costs. Major fertilizer producers including China, Turkey, Egypt and Russia also curbed exports in the second half of 2021, further pushing up global prices.

Or maybe the people making decisions do understand the implications, and they just don't care if people starve in parts of the world where they don't live. One comment I saw somewhere on a different article said basically that "nothing happens by accident." So, stupid or evil? Stupid is scarier, since evil only gets active from time to time, while stupid is everywhere, everyday.