When it comes to food production there are many fundamental problems facing the world (ie natural disasters, corrupt governments, lack of infrastructure to distribute food, etc.) but two problems often cited by the fertilizer companies are:
1) Exploding demand for food. "Shockingly" as people in the BRIC countries rise out of poverty they demand more food. Specifically people moving out of poverty begin to change their diets from starch to protein-based. This dramatic change in diets is driving the grain-intensive production of livestock (you gotta feed cattle a whole lotta crops to get them fat and tasty). Oh yeah, the world's population will also grow by 2.5 billion people in the next 40 years (from 6.7 to 9.2 billion people).
2) Less farm land exists (urbanization, pollution/environmental degradation) and yields from most existing farm crops are down considerably. The end result is that the supply of food is a lot harder to develop than it's been in the past as is reflected in this graph which shows current global food supplies:
As you can see, the stock-to-use ratio (which is just supply divided by demand) is at historical lows meaning that farmers have no choice but to spend considerable money on restocking their crop inventories. Likely these farmers will do whatever it takes to maximize yields from their existing farms, increasing their usage of fertilizers.
Given that macro perspective here are Potash Corp's internal expectations based on their production ramp up 16 million tons of potash by 2011 (I think 2012 is when we'll see the top).
Of course, these numbers are from management's perspective (I have heard these companies called the "dot-corns" given their parabolic charts) nevertheless I do believe that we are living in a "world of shortages" and that food is simply another item we in this country take for granted.
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