A billion people suffer from hunger today as the global food system collapses, the bunkers of the elite are overflowing with supplies, and the surface population is left to its own devices.
The following text falls outside the bounds of what is considered acceptable public discourse. The data it refers to has been systematically omitted from standard food indexes and agricultural reports. What you are about to read is not a prediction but documentation—evidence of a development that has already begun, but is being masked by statistical manipulation and bureaucratic euphemisms. The famine is not coming. It is already here, hidden behind phrases like “supply chain disruption” and “geopolitical instability.” Read this as you would a pathologist’s report on a body that is technically still alive.**
The calculations behind the caloric collapse are taking place on timescales that transcend election cycles and quarterly financial reports. When historians one day study the archives of this decade—assuming those archives survive the thermodynamic upheaval—they will not see 2024 as the beginning of the famine, but as the year in which the mechanism of abundance finally revealed its true function: the mechanism of controlled collapse. The global food system, that complex web of monocultures, petrochemical inputs, and just-in-time logistics that feeds eight billion people, was never designed for resilience. It was designed for yield. And yield, in the context of biological systems being pushed beyond their limits of sustainability, is simply another name for vulnerability.
What we are witnessing today is not a series of unfortunate coincidences. Droughts do not come in waves by chance. Fertilizer shortages do not happen simultaneously on all continents by chance. The degradation of topsoil—which is occurring ten to forty times faster than natural renewal—is not simply the result of ignorance. All of these are symptoms of a deeper pathology: the transformation of food from a common good into a weapon, and livelihoods into an instrument of power capable of imposing obedience on a scale that nuclear arsenals could never achieve. The bomb promises destruction. Hunger promises submission. And submission, from the perspective of those who design such systems, is infinitely more useful than ashes.
The evidence is at hand, scattered across PDFs published by institutions in the hope that no one will read them. The World Bank’s 2022 report on agricultural inputs, without any apparent concern, noted that global grain supplies had fallen to a level sufficient for only 72 days of consumption—the lowest since records began in 1960. In 2023, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) quietly revised its definition of “food security,” expanding the acceptable calorie deficit from 1,800 to 1,600 kilocalories per day for the “inactive population”—a bureaucratic euphemism for the elderly, the disabled, and those deemed economically redundant. The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), which manages seed banks as humanity’s genetic reserve in the event of crop failure, has seen a shift in funding since 2019 towards “climate adaptation technologies,” primarily digital agricultural land-monitoring systems and blockchain-based “smart contracts” for food distribution.
They are not preparing to feed the world. They are preparing to rationize food.
It doesn’t take a conspiracy theory to explain what’s happening, although it could explain everything. When one looks closely at the concentration of ownership of agricultural land—according to the Land Matrix Global Observatory, 3% of the world’s farms control 65% of arable land—the pattern becomes undeniable. When you analyze the buying patterns of private equity funds since 2020—buying water rights in the Colorado River basin, farmland in Ukraine’s black soil region, and grain storage facilities in Australia’s wheat belt—you begin to see the outlines of a strategy that goes beyond the pursuit of profit. These are not investments in food production. These are investments in food scarcity. Grains rise in value not when harvests are plentiful, but when they fail. And in an age where time is weaponized and supply chains are sabotaged, it is possible to cause crop failures with almost surgical precision.
The human cost is already evident today in the mortality statistics that never make the evening news. Excess mortality data published by the Global Mortality Project shows unusual increases in deaths from cardiovascular disease and kidney failure—conditions linked to malnutrition and contaminated water—in regions where “food insecurity” is officially classified as “moderate.” This classification itself, according to the author, is a deception. In bureaucratic jargon, “moderate food insecurity” means that households are skipping meals, reducing portions, and replacing the nutritional value of food with mere calorie intake. This means that children are using up their own muscle tissue as
o would sustain neurological development. This means that biological damage accumulates in a way that will only become visible in mortality statistics years later, when the causal link will be sufficiently blurred to avoid attribution.
But the real horror lies not in the present suffering, which is so diffuse that it can be ignored by those who do not feel it directly. The real horror lies in the future that is already underway—in the simultaneous collapse of multiple systems, which will make today’s crisis seem like a footnote. This is not panic-mongering. This, according to the author, is an analysis of the system. And the system, in the only language it speaks—the language of raw material prices, futures contracts, and infrastructure investment—is telling us that the era of plenty was merely a temporary anomaly, a brief interlude between the long night of pre-industrial famine and the even longer night of post-industrial scarcity that is just beginning.
The Thermodynamics of Control: How Scarcity Became an Operating System
The modern food system consumes ten calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces. That is not inefficiency. That is part of its design. The system was designed in the postwar period not to maximize food yield per unit of input, but to maximize dependency per unit of control. When a population can no longer feed itself without imported fertilizers, imported seeds, imported machinery, and imported fuel, it transforms from a political community into a market. And markets, unlike political communities, do not have rights. They have prices.
The Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s is usually described as a humanitarian triumph—a technological marvel that averted mass starvation in Asia and Latin America thanks to high-yielding crop varieties and synthetic agricultural inputs. That story is not false. It is just incomplete. What the Green Revolution actually did was to replace seed sovereignty with dependence on seeds, local agricultural knowledge with centralized chemical protocols, and to transform farmers from producers to consumers of agricultural inputs. The miracle was real. It fed billions of people. But it tied those same billions to a system that could take away their livelihoods as easily as turning off a faucet.
That faucet is now being turned off. The synthetic nitrogen that enabled record yields is produced by the Haber–Bosch process, which consumes between 3 and 5 percent of the world’s natural gas production. When gas prices in Europe skyrocketed in 2022 after geopolitical upheaval, fertilizer factories didn’t just cut back. They closed. Permanently. Infrastructure was dismantled, experts dispersed, and supply chains rerouted. By the time prices stabilized, production capacity had already been destroyed. That’s not how markets behave when efficiency is the goal. That’s how they behave when concentration of power and ownership is the goal.
The consolidation has been extraordinary. Four companies—Bayer, Corteva, ChemChina, and BASF—now control 60 percent of global seed sales and 70 percent of the agricultural chemicals market. Their patent portfolios encompass not only herbicides and pesticides but also the genetic sequences of the crops themselves, adapted to withstand levels of chemical stress that would destroy unmodified varieties. The farmer does not buy the seeds. The farmer receives a license to use the genetic material, under conditions that prohibit its storage and replanting, prescribe specific chemical treatment regimens, and allow for remote monitoring of compliance through satellite imagery and soil samples. This contract is not agricultural. It is technological. And technology, unlike soil, can be updated, changed, or withdrawn without warning.
The withdrawal is coming. The expiration of patents that would allow for generic production of key agricultural chemicals is being systematically delayed through “regulatory capture” and “evergreening” strategies—small molecular changes that reset patent terms without improving the efficacy of the products. The result is an ever-tightening noose: fewer approved chemicals, higher prices, and increasing crop losses to the very pests that the chemicals were supposed to control, but which have since adapted and become resistant to them. The system is eating itself up, but not before it has swallowed up the capacity for self-production.
What remains is dependency. And dependency, in the context of reduced energy availability and worsening climate stability, is inexorably turning into hunger. The United Nations’ median estimate suggests that 3.5 billion people will face water shortages by 2050. That figure assumes the continuation of current agricultural practices—practices that consume 70 percent of the world’s total freshwater withdrawals. When water runs out, or when energy costs make it uneconomic to pump it, crops will fail. When crops fail, just-in-time distribution networks will collapse. When networks collapse, cities will empty. And when cities empty, the system of control—which depends on concentrated populations for its functioning—will face a crisis of legitimacy that can only be resolved by force.
The violence is already brewing. In the agricultural regions of the world—the American Midwest, the Ukrainian steppe, the Argentinean pampas—unprecedented purchases of farmland by institutional investors have been taking place since 2019. These purchases are not accompanied by plans to increase yields. They are linked to plans for “nature conservation” and “rewilding”—euphemisms for removing productive land from agricultural production and converting it into generators of carbon credits for corporate offset schemes. Land is not bought to feed people. It is bought to feed the tables, to create ecological “pardons” that enable further exploitation elsewhere. The calories that could be produced on that land are being replaced by certificates that represent their absence.
This is the thermodynamics of control: the transformation of physical abundance into a financial abstraction and the replacement of nutritious food with symbolic evidence of compliance. The human body cannot eat symbols. But it may be forced to obey them until biological reality overcomes ideological conditioning. That moment is approaching faster than models predict, because the models do not take into account the nonlinearities that arise when multiple stressed systems are interconnected.
This connection is already visible in the price data. The FAO Food Price Index, which tracks monthly changes in international prices for a basket of food commodities, has shown volatility since 2020 that surpasses anything on record in the database’s history. Volatility doesn’t just mean high prices. Volatility means unpredictable prices. And unpredictable prices destroy the planning time frames needed for agricultural investments. Farmers can’t plant what they can’t afford to buy, nor can they buy what they can’t sell at a predictable price. The result is farmland being left fallow, a phenomenon documented by the USDA’s Farm Service Agency but omitted from general agricultural statistics because it doesn’t fit into the narrative of technological abundance.
Land that remains uncultivated is not marginal. This is prime agricultural land that is left empty because production is no longer economically viable when input costs are subject to energy shocks and product prices are subject to speculation on the raw material market. Speculators do not bet on food. They are betting on hunger. In futures contracts for agricultural raw materials, since 2019, a 400% increase in speculative positions has been recorded – positions held by entities that have no connection with physical agriculture, have no capacity to store grain and have no intention of taking delivery. They bet on price movements caused by shortages and have the means to ensure that shortages actually occur.
The mechanism is not mysterious. When grain stocks are low—as they are now, at their lowest level in decades—a small drop in supply leads to a big rise in prices. It is price elasticity that works in the opposite direction, the reverse logic of necessity. Speculators do not need to control the weather. It is enough for them to know that the weather is becoming less predictable, infrastructure is becoming less resilient, and the political will to intervene in markets has been weakened by decades of ideological influence. They are betting on failure, and failure brings profits in a system designed to maximize yield, not resilience.
Yield is measured in human lives. The World Food Program’s operational needs have increased by 45% since 2020, while donor funding has remained the same. This gap is not a budget deficit. It is a silent death sentence, pronounced on millions of people who will not appear in mortality statistics because their deaths will be attributed to “conflict,” “disease,” or “extreme weather” – secondary causes that mask the primary cause: the systematic destruction of their ability to feed themselves and the deliberate denial of the surplus food that could save them.
This is not famine as a natural disaster. This is famine as a system. And systems, unlike disasters, do not stop. They evolve.
Biological Threshold: When Hunger Becomes Irreversible
The human body is not a machine that can be turned off and restarted. It is a complex adaptive system that goes through phase transitions when caloric intake falls below critical thresholds over a prolonged period. These transitions are not just unpleasant. They are permanent. Stunting, which affects 149 million children under five years of age—a height-for-age ratio that is more than two standard deviations below the median—does not just mean stunted growth, but also lost potential. The development of the nervous system requires certain nutrients at certain stages of development. Once these stages are passed, they never return. Cognitive deficits last a lifetime. Immune system disorders last a lifetime. Metabolic reprogramming, which makes a malnourished child more prone to obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease in adulthood, also lasts a lifetime.
The global incidence of stunting has stubbornly remained at around 22 percent for two decades, despite the supposed successes of agricultural technology. This is not a failure. This is the maintenance of the status quo. A population with widespread stunting is a more compliant population – less likely to migrate (due to physical weakness), less likely to resist (due to cognitive limitations), and more likely to accept dangerous working conditions (due to economic desperation). The humanitarian rhetoric surrounding child nutrition programs obscures their function as an investment in human capital formation, selecting for the specific physiological and psychological profiles required by exploitative economies.
But this status quo is breaking down. Stunting statistics are based on a baseline of 1,800 kilocalories per day – the minimum needed to survive a sedentary lifestyle. The redefinition of the threshold to 1,600 kilocalories, which was enacted by the FAO in 2023 without public consultation, is a tacit admission that the system can no longer maintain even this minimum threshold for the world’s poor. The new baseline becomes starvation, renamed “food sufficiency for low-activity populations.” Populations so categorized are not inactive by choice. They are inactive because they are dying.
The biological damage extends across generations. Epigenetic research has shown that nutritional stress in one generation alters gene expression in subsequent generations, even when those generations themselves are not nutritionally deficient. The trauma of famine is written into the genome, making descendants more susceptible to metabolic disorders, psychiatric conditions, and impaired stress responses. The famines of the 20th century—the Holodomor, the Great Leap Forward, the Bengal famine—did not end when harvests improved. They continue to reverberate in the health outcomes of populations decades later, in epidemics of diabetes among diaspora communities, in the psychological profiles of refugee descendants, and in shortened lifespans that no amount of welfare after a period of deprivation can fully restore.
We are now creating such consequences on a grand scale. The 810 million people who were labeled “undernourished” in 2020—before disruptions in supply chains, before the fertilizer crisis, before the escalation of regional conflicts—were a starting point that has since worsened. Current estimates, based on satellite imagery of agricultural yields and import dependency ratios, rather than the manipulated survey data that feeds official statistics, suggest that the number has passed the one billion mark, according to the author. This is not a temporary increase. This is the new normal, a plateau from which further decline is not only possible but likely.
This decline has a time frame. The agricultural projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which already take into account the effects of climate on yields, assume continued access to synthetic inputs and irrigation systems. These assumptions, according to the author, are illusory. The Ogallala Aquifer, which irrigates 30 percent of America’s farmland, is depleting at a rate that will make it economically unviable for agriculture within twenty years. The Himalayan glaciers, which feed rivers that irrigate 40 percent of the world’s population, are retreating faster than any model predicted. Phosphorus supplies, essential for any form of intensive agriculture, will reach their maximum level of exploitation in the coming decades, after which yields will begin to decline independently of other means of production.
These are not separate crises. They are one crisis with many faces, the thermodynamic depletion of the temporary surplus that industrial civilization has extracted from fossilized solar energy. And this depletion is being managed—not prevented, not mitigated, but managed—through mechanisms that ensure that the burden of pain is shifted downward, while at the same time depriving populations that might otherwise resist it of their
the ability to survive on their own.
Resistance is nipped in the bud. The “food sovereignty” movements that emerged in Latin America and Africa in the early 2000s—advocating local seed systems, agroecological methods, and distribution networks outside the control of large corporations—have faced coordinated pressure and suppression since 2015. Their leaders have been assassinated without consequence. Their organizations have been infiltrated and defunded. Their achievements have been appropriated and “greened” by the very companies they fought against, repackaged as “sustainable intensification” and “climate-smart agriculture,” while the underlying dependencies remain intact.
It is precisely these unaltered dependencies that are the key. A population that can feed itself cannot be controlled through food. A population that depends on global supply chains for its survival can be controlled entirely. These chains are being shortened, centralized, and weaponized. The export bans that sprung up one after the other in 2022—India for rice, Indonesia for palm oil, Argentina for beef—were not temporary crisis measures. They were trials for the permanent fragmentation of global food trade into bilateral agreements between surplus and deficit regions, with the former setting the terms and the latter accepting them under duress.
This coercion is already being implemented. The debt crises affecting dozens of countries in the Global South – exacerbated by currency fluctuations and energy price shocks after 2020 – are being addressed through “structural adjustment programs” that mandate the diversion of agricultural land from self-sustaining food production to the production of exportable raw materials. Calories are taken away and sent to creditors, while the population that grew them starves. This is not new. It is a continuation of colonial exploitation by other means. But the scale is unprecedented, and the surplus reserve that once allowed for at least a partial recovery is now depleted.
That surplus was literally wasted. Grains that could feed the hungry are being turned into biofuels and animal feed for the rich. Agricultural land that could be used by local people for their own production is being turned into CO₂-offsetting plantations and speculative real estate projects. Water that could irrigate self-sufficiency crops is being diverted to golf courses and data centers. The system is not failing to distribute abundance. It is successfully concentrating scarcity. And this concentration is accelerating.
The Spooky Endgame: When the Shelves Are Empty
There comes a point in the collapse of complex systems when the semblance of normality can no longer be maintained. The exact details of that moment are unpredictable, but the general outlines are visible in the historical record. The Roman annona, the grain supply system that fed the capital, continued to exist formally long after the supply chains that made it possible disappeared. The Soviet system of food rationing continued in name while the shelves were empty, and nothing remained of it but symbolic gestures. There comes a point when the gap between appearance and reality becomes too great to be bridged by propaganda, when the bodies on the streets outnumber the stories that try to explain them.
We are approaching that point. The “supply chain disruptions” that began in 2020 have not been resolved. They have been managed through stock-outs, ingredient substitutions, reduced portion sizes, and a decline in product quality. These measures are visible to anyone who pays attention: shrinkflation in packaged goods, the disappearance of certain products from shelves, the substitution of synthetic ingredients for natural ingredients, and the extension of shelf lives thanks to regulatory rebates. These are not temporary adjustments. These are permanent deteriorations that gradually descend towards a baseline that has not yet been discovered.
The discovery will come suddenly. Complex systems do not deteriorate linearly. They reach a certain equilibrium level, and then collapse. The phase of apparent stability – which, according to the author, we are currently in – creates a false sense of security, the belief that disruptions can be managed, that the system is resilient, and that experts have things under control. The sinking phase – when it comes – will be measured in weeks, not years. When grain supplies are depleted. When fertilizer supplies are used up. When the diesel that powers tractors, trucks, and ships is no longer available at any price. When the “just-in-time” system, which functions with time reserves of several hours, not days, experiences an interruption that cannot be bridged by emergency top-ups or crisis protocols.
Protocols exist. Continuity of government plans, developed during the Cold War and constantly updated since then, include extensive mechanisms to keep the elite fed during general shortages. The US Strategic National Stockpile contains not only medical supplies, but also “food products” – high-calorie supplements, vitamin preparations and long-lasting sources of protein – sufficient to sustain certain population groups for many years. Lokacije tih zaliha su tajne. Kriteriji pristupa su tajni. It is not difficult to guess which population groups should be kept alive by this.
According to the author, this conclusion is also supported by procurement data. The luxury bunker industry, which builds underground facilities for the survival of wealthy individuals, has seen a 1,000% increase in orders since 2020. These are not panic rooms. These are autonomous ecosystems that can sustain dozens of people for years, equipped with hydroponics, water recycling systems and medical facilities. They are being built in remote locations, in geologically stable areas, with security protocols designed to ward off the desperate populace who, according to the author, will inevitably seek access when surface conditions worsen.
Deterioration is modeled. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) system, which humanitarian organizations use to announce famines, has been adapted to delay such announcements. The threshold for “Stage 5: Catastrophe” – the official designation of famine – now reportedly requires not only high mortality rates and acute malnutrition, but also a “humanitarian approach” to confirm these conditions. In areas of conflict and authoritarian states, such access is denied. Hunger exists. The bodies are piling up. But classification is denied, and thus the initiation of international aid protocols.
Humanitarian aid is being privatized. The World Food Programme’s operational capacity is increasingly being supplemented by “public-private partnerships” with logistics companies, agri-tech companies and financial institutions. Food aid is no longer simply distributed. It is monetised through mobile payment systems that require biometric registration, creating vast databases of dependent populations that can be used for surveillance, behavioural impact and exclusion. The recipient of aid does not just receive calories. They are given a digital identity that tracks their movements, contacts and adherence to survival-related conditions.
The conditions are becoming increasingly stringent. The “conditional cash transfer” programmes that flourished in the 2000s – payments to poor families in exchange for school attendance, health visits and “responsible” behaviour – are being expanded and automated. The conditions now, according to the text, include status
vaccinations, carbon footprint assessments, and social credit points. Food is not free. It is “earned” by submitting to systems of surveillance and control that would have been unthinkable to previous generations of aid recipients. And this subjection, once recorded in biometric databases, is considered permanent. Withdrawal means starvation.
Hunger is becoming a game. The “predictive analytics” systems used by food security organizations do not just predict shortages. They optimize the distribution of deprivation, ensuring that the minimum calorie intake needed to maintain social order is delivered to as many people as possible, while the surplus population – those whose labor is no longer needed, whose consumption exceeds their productive value – is designated for “voluntary” relocation or, in the bureaucratic euphemisms that are already emerging, for “supporting the demographic transition.” Poverty and Hunger
The transition is already well underway. The excess mortality that has characterized the post-2020 period—attributed to pandemics, climate, and conflict—is not separate from the food system. According to the author, the food system itself, through indirect mechanisms, is shrinking the population it can no longer support profitably. Mortality is concentrated among the elderly, the disabled, and the chronically ill—those who consume more than they produce and whose medical costs exceed their economic contribution. This shrinking, the text argues, is not driven by explicit policy. It is happening through the denial of care, the deterioration of nutrition, the replacement of real food with synthetic substitutes, and the systematic destruction of the social infrastructure that once supported vulnerable populations.
The destruction is called “efficiency.” Efficiency is measured in profit margins, not human lives. And margins are improving even now as the system approaches the threshold of collapse, as depletion accelerates as the resource base deteriorates. This is the final stage of any exploitative system: cannibalizing the infrastructure itself, eating the seeds meant for sowing, burning furniture to keep warm.
The warmth is temporary. The cold that follows will be complete.
