The Four Horsemen
Part Two – The Red Horse
It was a January 25, 2011. A beautiful Tuesday in Cairo and Egypt’s National Police Appreciation Day. Unfortunately, the average Egyptian wasn’t feeling very appreciative. Cities were seething with anxiety, fear and frustration over their inability to feed themselves and their children. And, rising malnutrition was the perfect environment for the Muslim Brotherhood to foment discontent and then an uprising.
How did such a situation come to pass?
In 2010, Egypt was being forced to eliminate all subsidies on food and energy. For millions of Egyptians, this meant being unable to eat. It meant stunted growth and stunted development for their children. As the simmering resentment reached boiling point, the government reacted with repression, sending out the police to beat up protestors.
By the time January rolled around, the Egyptians had had enough. So on January 25th, those with nothing to lose… lost it. And that’s how the latest Egyptian revolution began in 2011.
It wasn’t about democracy.
It was about food.
The Haber Process And Hunger
We are now facing a similar situation but on a far more global scale. At the beginning of 2022, long before the war in Ukraine started, European fertilizer manufacturers were warning that they will have to shut down operations if the price of natural gas kept going up. It did keep going up, and plants had to close operations.
Why is natural gas so important for fertilizer production?
Without it, you cannot make the nitrogen component that every fertilizer needs. And, all of that is due to a process that was invented by Fritz Haber in 1909. Up to that point in time, getting enough nitrogen into the soil to grow enough wheat was getting to be a serious problem. The population of the world in 1900 was 1.6 billion and they were struggling to harvest enough food to feed a growing population. And, the military needed nitrogen to make bombs and bullets.
With enough nitrogen, the average farm can produce four times more wheat. But, until Haber came along, nitrogen was expensive. You needed to mine bird guano in tropical islands to get enough, but you could only get what the explosives industry didn’t need. Bombs and bullets would always trump wheat and barley.
Carl Bosch was able to industrialize the Haber Process in 1910. By 1914, BASF was able to produce 20 metric tons of nitrogen a day. And, you’ll never guess what happened that year: World War I
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