The main difference between now and 1315 is the amount of calories we get from meat. When we have a food shortage, farmers can't afford to feed their cattle so they sell them, depressing the price of beef. Rich people eat more beef, and poor people eat cattle feed.

What really causes starvation is a shortage of shipping. Shipping wheat from Thunder Bay to Egypt requires a lot more ships than shipping from Odessa to Egypt.

I don't see what argument you're trying to make. All food will be affected, and billions may die.

In canada and US we grow so much corn to feed cattle and pigs, it’s so cheap that farmers have set up pellets stove that burn corn for heating.

So: kill the cows and the pigs, eat the meat and the feed.

I'm saying that if food production drops 30%, millions will die, not billions.

If both food production and oil production drop at the same time, then we're screwed.

Thus, we better get over our dependency of oil before the next food disaster hits.

(A volcanic winter would be quite bad for solar too. I don't know how fast we can scale fission in a disaster scenario, but I think it's our best hope. We should keep improving our fission tech too.)

A volcanic winter would only drop solar production 10% or so.

Another big virtual stockpile is ethanol. If the price of corn rises, less of it will be converted into ethanol. But if the price of oil rises faster than the price of gas...

It is sort of interesting -- in the US, we waste about 30%-40% of our food, so there's clearly enough food that we should be able to capture some excess (possibly changing our diets slightly, to make sure to eat stuff that spoils quickly and save stuff which can be made shell stable). Say we can only capture 1/4 of it, so, we stockpile ~a country's worth of food per decade. This seems like the most obvious possible thing for a people that has already met it's needs to do -- prepare for an emergencies. But we've never seen a famine like this, so we probably won't prepare for it.