As with anything, it is possible to go over the limit to achieve short gains at the expense of sacrificing the future (for example: an athlete can ignore an injury to win a tournament, but do permanent damage to his body in the process). The same is true in agriculture.

To keep food cheap, the ESF has promoted the use of high-yielding, destructive farming techniques in arid regions which could not support them. This increases production initially, but then slowly turns the land into a desert where nothing will grow.

Treasury interference in US market corrupted corporate culture. Bankers started behaving like there was no tomorrow because they knew something was fundamentally wrong with the system. They started pursuing business practices which can only be described as "picking up pennies in front of a steamroller".

Most the world has adopted intensive farming techniques which is degrading farmland. I have already written about how disaster is Feared As Desertification Spreads.

…
What is desertification

1) Desertification is the degradation of dryland ecosystems through a combination of natural and human causes.

2) Desertification occurs when human beings try to take too many resources from land that can sustain very little human life. When too many people try to plant crops, graze cattle and harvest firewood in a fragile dryland ecosystem, they tip the balance of sustainability.

3) When we talk about desertification, we’re not only talking about the slow spread of existing deserts, but the creation of entirely new ones.

1930′s Dust Bowl is a perfect example of desertification

1) In the 1920s, when the United States entered an economic recession, farmers in Western states tried to raise profits by plowing and planting more acreage with new mechanized farming methods.

2) Within a decade, a massive drought hit the entire country. Strong winds swept across the Great Plains, stirring up loose topsoil that had been displaced by overplowing and overgrazing of cattle. The results were dozens of epic dust storms that swallowed whole cities in blinding black clouds. The semiarid soil of the plains, which had fed generations with its fertile soil, was now A LIFELESS DESERT KNOWN AS THE DUST BOWL.

Disaster Feared As Desertification Spreads

1) New deserts are growing at a rate of 20,000 square miles (51,800 square kilometers) a year.

2) Save for the Antarctica, desertification affects all continents.

3) Nearly half of the world’s total land mass is composed of dryland ecosystems (areas defined by low annual rainfall and high temperatures), and 10 to 20 percent of these regions are already degraded – unsuitable for human, animal or plant life.

4) Dryland regions are also home to billions of the world’s poorest, most marginalized populations. As these people are displaced by new deserts, they are forced into even more unstable regions, where the desertification process continues.

5) More than 70 percent of drylands in Africa, Asia and Latin America that are being used for agricultural purposes are already experiencing the effects of desertification.

6) Desertification was one the sources of the global food crisis of 2008. Degradation of available farmland contributes to less food production and higher prices for staple crops like rice, wheat and corn.

7) Desertification leads to famine, mass starvation and unprecedented human migration.

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Desertification will created economic deserts

1) The UN is warning that parts of the world may have to be abandoned because severe water shortages will leave them uninhabitable

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Lets first be clear about something: the desertification happening around the world isn’t the result of global warming (thought it is possible global warming is making it worse). The desertification we are seeing, in every case, is clearly the result of reckless and extensive overuse of drylands around the world.

Even if the world miraculously cuts carbon emissions to a fraction of their current level, desertification will continue as long as rampant farming and wasteful irrigation practices remain common in regions that do not support them.

Desertification means lower food production in the near future

Governments have two choices:

A) Do nothing and let food output slowly drops as agricultural land turns into sand dunes.
B) Restrain rampant farming, wasteful irrigation, and other harmful practices, stemming desertification at the cost of a drop in production

No matter what actions governments take, the only certainty is that global grain output will drop significantly.
…

The Treasury’s ESF is directly responsible for the destructive farming techniques wrecking havoc in the world today. Take, for example, ESF’s intervention (through the CIA) in Indian agriculture.

Appendix I: Ford Foundation – A Case Study of the Aims of Foreign Funding

"Someday someone must give the American people a full report of the work of the Ford Foundation in India. The several million dollars in total Ford expenditures in the country do not tell one-tenth of the story." – Chester Bowles (former US ambassador to India).
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Ford and the CIA

The fact is that the US Central Intelligence Agency has long operated through a number of philanthropic foundations; most prominently Ford Foundation. …
…
The CIA’s infiltration of US foundations in general was massive. A 1976 Select Committee of the US Senate discovered that during 1963-66, of 700 grants each of over $10,000 given by 164 foundations, at least 108 were partially or wholly CIA-funded. According to Petras, "The ties between the top officials of the FF and the U.S. government are explicit and continuing. A review of recently funded projects reveals that the FF has never funded any major project that contravenes U.S. policy."
…

Ford Foundation intervention in Indian agriculture

Given the background of the Chinese revolution and the Telangana struggle, the US priority in India was to find ways to head off agrarian unrest. …

In 1959, a team led by a US department of agriculture economist produced the Ford Foundation’s Report on India’s Food Crisis and Steps to Meet It. In place of institutional change (ie redistribution of land and other rural assets) as the key-stone to agricultural development, this report stressed technological change (improved seeds, chemical fertilisers, and pesticides) in small, already irrigated, pockets. This was the ‘Green Revolution’ strategy. Ford even funded the Intensive Agricultural Development Programme (IADP) as a test case of the strategy, providing rich farmers in irrigated areas with subsidised inputs, generous credit, price incentives, and so on. The World Bank too put its weight behind this strategy.

Soon it was adopted by the Indian government, with far-reaching effects. Agricultural production of rice and wheat in the selected pockets grew immediately. …

The ‘Green Revolution’ strategy has lead to disaster in India. The Wall Street Journal reports that Green Revolution in India Wilts as Subsidies Backfire.

FEBRUARY 23, 2010
Green Revolution in India Wilts as Subsidies Backfire
By GEETA ANAND

SOHIAN, India—India’s Green Revolution is withering.

In the 1970s, India dramatically increased food production, finally allowing this giant country to feed itself. But government efforts to continue that miracle by encouraging farmers to use fertilizers have backfired, forcing the country to expand its reliance on imported food.

Popularized during the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, fertilizers helped boost crop yields and transformed India into a nation that could feed itself. But now their overuse is degrading the farmland.

India has been providing farmers with heavily subsidized fertilizer for more than three decades. The overuse of one type—urea—is so degrading the soil that yields on some crops are falling and import levels are rising. So are food prices, which jumped 19% last year. The country now produces less rice per hectare than its far poorer neighbors: Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

…
Farmers spread the rice-size urea granules by hand or from tractors. They pay so little for it that in some areas they use many times the amount recommended by scientists, throwing off the chemistry of the soil, according to multiple studies by Indian agricultural experts.

Like humans, plants need balanced diets to thrive. Too much urea oversaturates plants with nitrogen without replenishing other nutrients that are vitally important, including phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, magnesium and calcium.
…
As the soil’s fertility has declined, farmers under pressure to increase output have spread even more urea on their land.

Kamaljit Singh is a 55-year-old farmer in the town of Marauli Kalan in the state of Punjab, the breadbasket of India. He says farmers feel stuck. "The soil health is deteriorating, but we don’t know how to make it better," he says. "As the fertility of the soil is declining, more fertilizer is required."

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[Before India’s “Green Revolution”]

In the early years after India gained independence in 1947, the country couldn’t even dream of feeding its population. Importing food wasn’t possible because India lacked the cash to pay. India relied on food donated by the U.S. government.

[India’s “Green Revolution” begins in 1967]

In 1967, then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi imported 18,000 tons of hybrid wheat seeds from Mexico. The effect was miraculous. The wheat harvest that year was so bountiful that grain overflowed storage facilities.

Those seeds required chemical fertilizers to maximize yield. …
…
[India’s “Green Revolution” today]

In the northern state of Punjab, Bhupinder Singh, a turbaned, gray-bearded 55-year-old farmer, stood barefoot in his wheat field in December and pointed to the corner where he had just spread a 110-pound bag of urea.

"Without the urea, my crop looks sick," he said, picking up a few stalks of the young wheat crop and twirling them in his fingers. "THE SOIL IS GETTING WEAKER AND WEAKER OVER THE LAST 10 TO 15 YEARS. We need MORE AND MORE UREA TO GET THE SAME YIELD."

Mr. Singh farms 10 acres in Sohian, a town about 25 miles from the industrial city of Ludhiana. He said his yields of rice have fallen to three tons per acre, from 3.3 tons five years ago. By using twice as much urea, he’s been able to squeeze a little higher yield of wheat from the soil—two tons per acre, versus 1.7 tons five years ago.

He said both the wheat and rice harvests should be bigger, considering that he’s using so much more urea today than he did five years ago. ADDING UREA DOESN’T HAVE THE EFFECT IT DID IN THE PAST, he said, but it’s so cheap that it’s better than adding nothing at all.
…
"The future is not good here," he said, shaking his head.
…

Deteriorating soil health had lead to desertification in India. Caritas.org reports about desertification in India.

Desertification in India
…
Half the land in India is now affected by desertification and this impairs the ability of land to support life. It is particularly devastating because of its self-reinforcing nature.

The causes of desertification are extensive cultivation of one crop, use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides, shifting cultivation without adequate period of recovery, industrial and mining activities, overgrazing, logging and illegal felling, forest fires and unsustainable water management.
…

Gentledude.blogspot.com reports about Desertification In South India.

Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Desertification In South India
…
Kannekal and Bommanahal are like any other village in South India 150 years ago. A fertile soil that yielded two crops a year, abundant rainfall, and plentiful of grass for the livestock. Centuries ago wars have been fought for the fertile lands. But Hagari, the river that flows by the villages had severe floods for a couple of years. And with the floods came sand. The sand dunes spread across the area pretty quickly, thanks to strong winds in the area. Thus started the process of desertification. Soon rainfall decreased in the area and the sand dunes started spreading quickly. The inhabitants of these villages continued with indiscriminate use of water and instead of taking steps to conserve water, used up even more water for irrigation using bore wells. This resulted in an even faster spreading of sand dunes. Now thousands of acres of land is covered by these sand dunes.

As I have written before, India faces a bleak future.

The Chart below shows worldwide growth in fertilizer use. Notice India’s 54 percent increase in fertilizer use over the last ten years.

cid:image004.jpg@01CAEB66.26EFED10

Chart below shows India’s wheat output. The red bar highlights the last ten years (where India’s fertilizer use increase 54 percent). The green bar highlights the start of India’s “green revolution”.

cid:image005.png@01CAEB62.5EDD6350

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Now look at what happened with India’s population since the Green Revolution began.

cid:image007.jpg@01CAEB66.26EFED10

Seems like India has two choices:

1) Switch to more sustainable farming methods and try to feed twice the population with pre-“green revolution” grain production levels.
2) Continue “green revolution” farming methods and watch deteriorating soil health and desertification slowly eat away at grain production.

Both of these choices involve a lot of people not having food any more. Seems India is somewhat screwed.

For more on this, try googling overshoot-and-collapse food economy…

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3) Boosting supply by exausting NONREPLENISHABLE resources

By tapping your savings, it is possible to live above your means, temporarily. In its quest for cheap food, The ESF has promoted the use of nonreplenishable resources (the world’s “savings”) to boost agricultural production. Two examples of this are the overpumping aquifers and the use natural gas (fossil fuel) to produce nitrogen fertilizer.

Like most ESF schemes, this is now reaching the breaking point. The Encyclopedia Of Earth reports about aquifer depletion.

Aquifer depletion
Last Updated: September 14, 2006

Scores of countries are overpumping aquifers as they struggle to satisfy their growing water needs, including each of the big three grain producers-China, India, and the United States. These three, along with a number of other countries where water tables are falling, are home to more than half the world’s people. (See Table at end of article.)

There are two types of aquifers: replenishable and nonreplenishable (or fossil) aquifers. Most of the aquifers in India and the shallow aquifer under the North China Plain are replenishable. When these are depleted, the maximum rate of pumping is automatically reduced to the rate of recharge.

For fossil aquifers—such as the vast U.S. Ogallala aquifer, the deep aquifer under the North China Plain, or the Saudi aquifer—DEPLETION BRINGS PUMPING TO AN END. Farmers who lose their irrigation water have the option of returning to lower-yield dryland farming if rainfall permits. In more arid regions, however, such as in the southwestern United States or the Middle East, THE LOSS OF IRRIGATION WATER MEANS THE END OF AGRICULTURE.

Falling water tables are already adversely affecting harvests in some countries, including China, the world’s largest grain producer. A groundwater survey released in Beijing in August 2001 revealed that the water table under the North China Plain, which produces over half of that country’s wheat and a third of its corn, is falling faster than earlier reported. Overpumping has largely depleted the shallow aquifer, forcing well drillers to turn to the region’s deep fossil aquifer, which is not replenishable.

The survey, conducted by the Geological Environmental Monitoring Institute (GEMI) in Beijing, reported that under Hebei Province in the heart of the North China Plain, the average level of the deep aquifer was dropping nearly 3 meters (10 feet) per year. Around some cities in the province, it was falling twice as fast. He Qingcheng, head of the GEMI groundwater monitoring team, notes that as the deep aquifer is depleted, the region is losing its last water reserve-its only safety cushion.

He Qingcheng’s concerns are mirrored in a World Bank report: "Anecdotal evidence suggests that deep wells [drilled] around Beijing now have to reach 1,000 meters [more than half a mile] to tap fresh water, adding dramatically to the cost of supply." In unusually strong language for a Bank report, it foresees "CATASTROPHIC CONSEQUENCES FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS" unless water use and supply can quickly be brought back into balance.

The U.S. embassy in Beijing reports that wheat farmers in some areas are now pumping from a depth of 300 meters, or nearly 1,000 feet. Pumping water from this far down raises pumping costs so high that farmers are often forced to abandon irrigation and return to less productive dryland farming.

Falling water tables, the conversion of cropland to nonfarm uses, and the loss of farm labor in provinces that are rapidly industrializing are combining to shrink China’s grain harvest. The wheat crop, grown mostly in semiarid northern China, is particularly vulnerable to water shortages. After peaking at 123 million tons in 1997, the harvest has fallen in five of the last eight years, coming in at 95 million tons in 2005, a drop of 23 percent.

The U.S. embassy also reports that the recent decline in rice production is partly a result of water shortages. After peaking at 140 million tons in 1997, the harvest dropped in four of the following eight years, falling to an estimated 127 million tons in 2005. Only corn, China’s third major grain, has thus far avoided a decline. This is because corn prices are favorable and because the crop is not as irrigation-dependent as wheat and rice are.

Overall, China’s grain production has fallen from its historical peak of 392 million tons in 1998 to an estimated 358 million tons in 2005. For perspective, this drop of 34 million tons exceeds the annual Canadian wheat harvest. China largely covered the drop-off in production by drawing down its once vast stocks until 2004, at which point it imported 7 million tons of grain.

A World Bank study indicates that China is overpumping three river basins in the north–the Hai, which flows through Beijing and Tianjin; the Yellow; and the Huai, the next river south of the Yellow. Since it takes 1,000 tons of water to produce one ton of grain, the shortfall in the Hai basin of nearly 40 billion tons of water per year (1 ton equals 1 cubic meter) means that when the aquifer is depleted, THE GRAIN HARVEST WILL DROP BY 40 MILLION TONS–enough to feed 120 million Chinese.

Of the leading grain producers, only China has thus far experienced a substantial decline in production. Even with a worldwide grain crunch and climbing grain prices providing an incentive to boost production, it will be difficult for China to regain earlier grain production levels, given the loss of irrigation water.

Serious though emerging water shortages are in China, they are even more serious in India simply because the margin between actual food consumption and survival is so precarious. In a survey of India’s water situation, Fred Pearce reported in the New Scientist that the 21 million wells drilled in this global epicenter of well-drilling are lowering water tables in most of the country. In North Gujarat, the water table is falling by 6 meters (20 feet) per year.

In Tamil Nadu, a state with more than 62 million people in southern India, wells are going dry almost everywhere. According to Kuppannan Palanisami of Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, falling water tables have dried up 95 percent of the wells owned by small farmers, reducing the irrigated area in the state by half over the last decade.

As water tables fall, well drillers are using modified oil-drilling technology to reach water, going as deep as 1,000 meters in some locations. In communities where underground water sources have dried up entirely, all agriculture is rain-fed and drinking water is trucked in. Tushaar Shah, who heads the International Water Management Institute’s groundwater station in Gujarat, says of India’s water situation: "When the balloon bursts, untold anarchy will be the lot of rural India."

At this point, the harvests of wheat and rice, India’s principal food grains, are still increasing. But within the next few years, [in 2011 (five years since article was written, it has already begun] the loss of irrigation water could override technological progress and start shrinking the harvest in some areas, as it is already doing in China.

In the United States, the USDA reports that in parts of Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas–three leading grain-producing states–the underground water table has dropped by more than 30 meters (100 feet). As a result, wells have gone dry on thousands of farms in the southern Great Plains. Although this mining of underground water is taking a toll on U.S. grain production, irrigated land accounts for only one-fifth of the U.S. grain harvest, compared with close to three-fifths of the harvest in India and four-fifths in China.

Pakistan, a country with 158 million people that is growing by 3 million per year, is also mining its underground water. In the Pakistani part of the fertile Punjab plain, the drop in water tables appears to be similar to that in India. Observation wells near the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi show a fall in the water table between 1982 and 2000 that ranges from 1 to nearly 2 meters a year.

In the province of Baluchistan, water tables around the capital, Quetta, are falling by 3.5 meters per year. Richard Garstang, a water expert with the World Wildlife Fund and a participant in a study of Pakistan’s water situation, said in 2001 that "within 15 years Quetta will run out of water if the current consumption rate continues." [It is now 2011. About four years left]

The water shortage in Baluchistan is province-wide. Sardar Riaz A. Khan, former Director of Pakistan’s Arid Zone Research Institute in Quetta, reports that six basins have exhausted their groundwater supplies, leaving their irrigated lands barren. Khan expects that within 10-15 years virtually all the basins outside the canal-irrigated areas will have depleted their groundwater supplies, depriving the province of much of its grain harvest.

Future irrigation water cutbacks as a result of aquifer depletion will undoubtedly reduce Pakistan’s grain harvest. Countrywide, the harvest of wheat–the principal food staple–is continuing to grow, but more slowly than in the past.

Iran, a country of 70 million people, is overpumping its aquifers by an average of 5 billion tons of water per year, the water equivalent of one-third of its annual grain harvest. Under the small but agriculturally rich Chenaran Plain in northeastern Iran, the water table was falling by 2.8 meters a year in the late 1990s. New wells being drilled both for irrigation and to supply the nearby city of Mashad are responsible. Villages in eastern Iran are being abandoned as wells go dry, generating a flow of “water refugees.”

Saudi Arabia, a country of 25 million people, is as water-poor as it is oil-rich. Relying heavily on subsidies, it developed an extensive irrigated agriculture based largely on its deep fossil aquifer. After several years of using oil money to support wheat prices at five times the world market level, the government was forced to face fiscal reality and cut the subsidies. Its wheat harvest dropped from a high of 4.1 million tons in 1992 to 1.2 million tons in 2005, a drop of 71 percent. [Saudi Arabia is phasing out wheat production entirely by 2016]

Craig Smith writes in the New York Times, “From the air, the circular wheat fields of this arid land’s breadbasket look like forest green poker chips strewn across the brown desert. But they are outnumbered by the ghostly silhouettes of fields left to fade back into the sand, places where the kingdom’s gamble on agriculture has sucked precious aquifers dry.” Some Saudi farmers are now pumping water from wells that are 4,000 feet deep, nearly four-fifths of a mile (1 mile equals 1.61 kilometers).

A 1984 Saudi national survey reported fossil water reserves at 462 billion tons. Half of that, Smith reports, has probably disappeared by now. This suggests that irrigated agriculture could last for another decade or so and then will largely vanish [Saudi Arabia is phasing out wheat production by 2016], limited to the small area that can be irrigated with water from the shallow aquifers that are replenished by the kingdom’s sparse rainfall. It is a classic example of an overshoot-and-collapse food economy.

In neighboring Yemen, a nation of 21 million, the water table under most of the country is falling by roughly 2 meters a year as water use outstrips the sustainable yield of aquifers. In western Yemen’s Sana’a Basin, the estimated annual water extraction of 224 million tons exceeds the annual recharge of 42 million tons by a factor of five, dropping the water table 6 meters per year. World Bank projections indicate the Sana’a Basin-—site of the national capital, Sana’a, and home to 2 million people—-will be pumped dry by 2010.

In the search for water, the Yemeni government has drilled test wells in the basin that are 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) deep-—depths normally associated with the oil industry—-but they have failed to find water. Yemen must soon decide whether to bring water to Sana’a, possibly by pipeline from coastal desalting plants, if it can afford it, or to relocate the capital. Either alternative will be costly and potentially traumatic.

With its population growing at 3 percent a year and with water tables falling everywhere, Yemen is fast becoming a hydrological basket case. Aside from the effect of overpumping on the capital, World Bank official Christopher Ward observes that “groundwater is being mined at such a rate that parts of the rural economy could disappear within a generation.” [See Google Archive News results for Yemen water]

Israel, even though a pioneer in raising irrigation water productivity, is depleting both of its principal aquifers—-the coastal aquifer and the mountain aquifer that it shares with Palestinians. Israel’s population, whose growth is fueled by both natural increase and immigration, is outgrowing its water supply. Conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians over the allocation of water in the latter area are ongoing. Because of severe water shortages, Israel has banned the irrigation of wheat.

In Mexico-—home to a population of 107 million that is projected to reach 140 million by 2050—-the demand for water is outstripping supply. Mexico City’s water problems are well known and rural areas are also suffering. For example, in the agricultural state of Guanajuato, the water table is falling by 2 meters or more a year. At the national level, 51 percent of all the water extracted from underground is from aquifers that are being overpumped.

Since the overpumping of aquifers is occurring in many countries more or less simultaneously, the depletion of aquifers and the resulting harvest cutbacks could come AT ROUGHLY THE SAME TIME. And the accelerating depletion of aquifers means this day may come soon, creating potentially UNMANAGEABLE FOOD SCARCITY.

The New York Times reports about the shortages threaten farmers’ key tool: fertilizer.

April 30, 2008
Shortages Threaten Farmers’ Key Tool: Fertilizer
By KEITH BRADSHER and ANDREW MARTIN

… the widespread use of inexpensive chemical fertilizer, coupled with market reforms, helped power an agricultural explosion here that had already occurred in other parts of the world. Yields of rice and corn rose, and diets grew richer.

Now those gains are threatened in many countries by spot shortages and soaring prices for fertilizer, the most essential ingredient of modern agriculture.

Some kinds of fertilizer have nearly tripled in price in the last year, keeping farmers from buying all they need. That is one of many factors contributing to a rise in food prices that, according to the United Nations’ World Food Program, threatens to push tens of millions of poor people into malnutrition.

Protests over high food prices have erupted across the developing world, and the stability of governments from Senegal to the Philippines is threatened.

In the United States, farmers in Iowa eager to replenish nutrients in the soil have increased the age-old practice of spreading hog manure on fields. In India, the cost of subsidizing fertilizer for farmers has soared, leading to political dispute. And in Africa, plans to stave off hunger by increasing crop yields are suddenly in jeopardy.

The squeeze on the supply of fertilizer has been building for roughly five years. Rising demand for food and biofuels prompted farmers everywhere to plant more crops. As demand grew, the fertilizer mines and factories of the world proved unable to keep up.

Some dealers in the Midwest ran out of fertilizer last fall, and they continue to restrict sales this spring because of a limited supply.

“If you want 10,000 tons, they’ll sell you 5,000 today, maybe 3,000,” said W. Scott Tinsman Jr., a fertilizer dealer in Davenport, Iowa. “The rubber band is stretched really far.”

…
Agriculture and development experts say the world has few alternatives to its growing dependence on fertilizer. As population increases and a rising global middle class demands more food, fertilizer is among the most effective strategies to increase crop yields.

“Putting fertilizer on the ground on a one-acre plot can, in typical cases, raise an extra ton of output,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, the Columbia University economist who has focused on eradicating poverty. “That’s the difference between life and death.”

…
Fertilizer is plant food, a combination of nutrients added to soil to help plants grow. The three most important are nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. The latter two have long been available. But nitrogen in a form that plants can absorb is scarce, and the lack of it led to low crop yields for centuries.

That limitation ended in the early 20th century with the invention of a procedure, now primarily fueled by natural gas, that draws chemically inert nitrogen from the air and converts it into a usable form.

As the use of such fertilizer spread, it was accompanied by improved plant varieties and greater mechanization. From 1900 to 2000, worldwide food production jumped by 600 percent. Scientists said that increase was the fundamental reason world population was able to rise to about 6.7 billion today from 1.7 billion in 1900.

Vaclav Smil, a professor at the University of Manitoba, calculates that WITHOUT NITROGEN FERTILIZER, THERE WOULD BE INSUFFICIENT FOOD FOR 40 PERCENT OF THE WORLD’S POPULATION, at least based on today’s diets. [KEY POINT]

…
“This is a basic problem, to feed 6.6 billion people,” said Norman Borlaug, an American scientist who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his role in spreading intensive agricultural practices to poor countries. “Without chemical fertilizer, forget it. THE GAME IS OVER.”

The thing about living beyond your means by tapping your savings is that it is very painful when those savings run out.