'6 Billion People Will Starve': Professor Jiang, The 'China's Nostradamus' Who Predicted Iran War, Issues Stark Warning

The geopolitical analyst who predicted the US-Iran war before it began has warned that the conflict will become America's next 'forever war,' choking off global fertiliser supply and leaving six billion people at risk of starvation.

Jiang Xueqin, the Chinese-born commentator known online as 'Professor Jiang' and widely dubbed 'China's Nostradamus', laid out the warning during a two-hour appearance on The Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett.

Jiang, whose Predictive History YouTube channel has drawn over 2.5 million subscribers in roughly a year, previously forecast both Trump's 2024 election victory and the subsequent invasion of Iran.

His starkest claim centred on fertiliser. The Strait of Hormuz, the 33-kilometre chokepoint Iran has effectively shut since the conflict began, is the corridor through which a large share of the world's fertiliser components normally flow. With insurers refusing to cover vessels, those shipments have stalled.

'The world depends on fertiliser,' Jiang told Bartlett, referencing an earlier episode of the podcast featuring economist Steve Keen. 'Without fertilizers, the world could only sustain at most two billion people.'

That leaves six billion without a reliable food source. 'What are the six billion people going to do? Just starve to death? No. They're going to migrate,' he said. 'And this is going to create a huge global crisis throughout the world.'

How the Fertiliser Bottleneck Threatens Global Food Supply

Jiang's six billion figure is his own extrapolation, but institutional data supports the broader alarm. The Food and Agriculture Organization warned this month that one-third of all globally traded fertiliser normally transits the Strait of Hormuz, and the scarcity will reduce crop yields into late 2026 and 2027. The World Food Programme has separately estimated the disruption could push 45 million additional people into hunger.

Research from Our World in Data puts the dependency in context. Synthetic nitrogen fertilisers, produced through the Haber-Bosch process, support approximately 48 per cent of the current global population. Remove those inputs entirely and roughly 3.5 to four billion people lose their primary food source.

Keen, an honorary professor at University College London who predicted the 2008 financial crash, warned during his own Diary of a CEO appearance in April that India could exhaust its fertiliser stockpiles within two to three months. 'Food production on the planet could fall 10-25 per cent and there simply won't be enough food for everyone on the planet,' he said. 'Then it's a question of who's going to starve.'

Jiang added that the Gulf Cooperation Council nations, including Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, import 80 to 90 per cent of their own food despite being major fertiliser exporters. The region, in his telling, sits at the centre of compounding vulnerabilities.

'Forever War' and the Push Toward a US Draft

Jiang framed the food and energy fallout not as collateral damage but as strategic logic. A prolonged war forces the rest of the world to buy American energy, he argued, propping up the dollar. 'This war in Iran benefits America tremendously. So why not have it go on for a long, long time?' he said.

To sustain such a war, Jiang predicted the US will eventually need conscription. He pointed to the automatic Selective Service registration provision signed into law on 18 December 2025 as part of the Fiscal Year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act. All men aged 18 to 26 will be automatically enrolled in the draft pool by December 2026. The bipartisan measure has no formal connection to Iran, and Congress would need a separate vote to activate an actual draft.

'In order to make sure this war goes on for a long time, you need ground troops. And you need a lot of ground troops. And that's why you need a national draft,' Jiang told Bartlett.

Jiang, despite the professorial title, is not a university academic. He is a Yale-educated high school teacher based in China. His forecasts remain speculative. But with the FAO, the UN and commodity markets all sounding the alarm on fertiliser, the supply-chain crisis underpinning his argument is no longer theoretical.