Yahweh had given Nephi power to impose a famine in the sixty-ninth year (Hel. 10:6). Four years later, he invokes that power (v. 2, 5). It had the desired effect of halting the civil war. Because all food was produced locally in the ancient world, men could either be in the army or in their fields. With fewer people to tend crops, there were more mouths to feed not involved in crop production. The longer the war, the harder the rest of the people had to work to produce more than their needs, or eat less themselves, to feed the army. In a civil war, both contenders relied upon the same basic food sources. When a famine came, there was no extra food for the army. The men could starve in the army or return home and hope to be able to scratch minimal subsistence from the earth until the famine ended. Diego de Landa describes a drought among the Maya of the Yucatán after the conquest: “There came such a hunger that people were falling dead in the roads, [so many that] when the Spaniards returned, they didn’t recognize the land.”