Population going down

yar this is a common mistake , when you use a few turns you miss out on what happens in the middle

basicly you do have food , maybe even produce some , during your turns your population will increase , eat more than you produce / have , die of starvation , loyalty and pop will drop , then you will produce some more food due to low population

so your end result will leave you confused

humm you population became cannibals and began to eat each other. lol

if you need say 5 k food a turn and you got 100 k food, and then use 10 turns in one go(50 k food) your pop will decrease and loyalty go down, you got to have more than half the food you use... if you do then its one of the odddity bugs in this game, there is a few of them. Btw virals got hole different set of bugs than the rest of the game, including some loyalty ones.