The mega drought was a fairly unrealistic contrivance to essentially destroy the U.S. to (IMHO) pave the way for France being the dominant superpower in Traveller:2300 / 2300 AD.
It's unrealistic because the US has several different major sources of water. Aquifers aren't going to deplete during a single dry season, coastal areas will still get rain - most of the Atlantic / Gulf region simply does not have the geographical features to not get rain and the Mississippi and it's tributaries span the largest continental water system in the world, which is partially fed by the Great Lakes. Now, if you ignore "mega-drought" and instead use "climate/weather upheaval", then it allows more wiggle room. Some areas are in drought, other areas are inundated, some areas get the Goldilox rain, but maybe those are the areas outside MilGov/CivGov/NA control and thus there is no organized large scale planting, etc.
Now, I realize that it was largely a contrivance to set the stage for 2300AD and explain why America wasn't the pre-imminent superpower for that setting, and it was probably thought up in a week or so under a deadline, but I've always ignored it. IIRC, the mega-drought was published around the same time GDW was publishing Traveler:TNE, and they were going through their "kill everyone" phase of RPG publishing.
The bottom line is, mechanization, inorganic fertilizers, hybrid seeds, and pesticides account for about a 5x increase in agriculture yields. Take away all that and not even have animal labor to fall back on (because what farms in America are configured to plow fields with oxen these days?) and you'll have a precipitous drop in population pretty quickly.
Incidentally, the US keeps around 12-24 months worth of grain, so we are also more than one bad harvest away from starvation. My head cannon to explain the fall 1998 collapse is that much of that food reserve was shipped to Europe during late 1997 and early 1998 to keep our European allies from starving given the earlier use of nukes and the larger disruptions to agriculture that would have happened by the war.
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