doubled, reaching well beyond 6 billion. If you had to pick a single silver bullet that allowed this surge, it would be ammonium nitrate, an astonishingly cheap and effective crop fertilizer. It wouldn’t be much of an overstatement to say that ammonium nitrate feeds the world. If it disappeared overnight, says the agricultural economist Will Masters, “most people’s diets would revert to heaps of cereal grains and root crops, with animal products and fruits only for special occasions and for the rich.”
