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How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?

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Re: How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?

#81

Post by enturn »

kartan wrote: post #75
einpoklum wrote: post #54

The question should really be "How are many national economies keeping innumerable people hungry, even though there's plenty of food to go around several times over?" In most places in the world it's easy and cheap enough to produce food and distribute it. Actually, it's so easy and cheap that many world states artificially subsidize agriculture/livestock farming/etc. to prevent them from collapsing due to low prices…

> "How are many national economies keeping innumerable people hungry, even though there's plenty of food to go around several times over?" I never see this question on TV. What I mainly see on Tv is talk about political strategies, result surveys and the like. Climate change is one of the few things that I see being discussed. And even that has a lot of this let's talk about politicians positions and poll results. I…

You could try TED (or TEDx) talks. For example, a couple of titles I see by skimming the video list are "The living tech we need to support human life on other planets" and "5 challenges we could solve by designing new proteins".

Re: How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?

#82

Post by tepidandroid »

baybal2 wrote: post #58
dmix wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the first answer has “Western media won’t tell you this”. Like there’s some western conspiracy to downplay Chinese agriculture industry. The Chinese media is constantly telling their people that the US is plotting against China and is hostile to them, so the citizens don’t get any crazy ideas like democracy and human rights. While simultaneously amplifying the bad news coming out of America to show the ‘dangers’…

Chinese domestic media threatens to nuke US just any godly day, but saying that, you should also know that quite a number of Chinese media personas were sacked for wrong gestures towards the West in their English language medias, and their military bamboozlers were few times sent to jail over unauthorised threats to USA made in small, nobody known military newspapers. I heard once that 50 centers were at some point p…

Chinese domestic media is for the most part trash and it's well understood that it conveys the views of the ruling political class. It has never even pretended to be an unbiased source of information.

As far as the Chinese domestic media threatening to nuke US just any godly day, I highly doubt it and I've never seen this. Their domestic media is much more focused on internal development and accomplishments. It serves the purpose of reminding the people how great the Central Government is, which is the CCP's primary objective. International affairs (even with the U.S) are an afterthought. You won't find nearly the amount of vitriol directed towards the U.S that the U.S media directs towards China.

Re: How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?

#85

Post by feral »

kartan wrote: post #75
einpoklum wrote: post #54

The question should really be "How are many national economies keeping innumerable people hungry, even though there's plenty of food to go around several times over?" In most places in the world it's easy and cheap enough to produce food and distribute it. Actually, it's so easy and cheap that many world states artificially subsidize agriculture/livestock farming/etc. to prevent them from collapsing due to low prices…

> "How are many national economies keeping innumerable people hungry, even though there's plenty of food to go around several times over?" I never see this question on TV. What I mainly see on Tv is talk about political strategies, result surveys and the like. Climate change is one of the few things that I see being discussed. And even that has a lot of this let's talk about politicians positions and poll results. I…

Opinion:

The tough truth is that improving the world at that scale is mostly about politics. Politics is how the nations allocate resources to problems.

You maybe want them to talk about the technical fundamentals of the problem but the important bit is usually the politics.

[A sibling comment says to look at TED talks. This is an excellent idea. Then, after a couple of years, ask why none of the solutions have been implemented, and you are ready to get interested in the politics.]

Re: How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?

#86

Post by ArlenBales »

scarface74 wrote: post #36

I can’t imagine the US being as efficient at anything as China is at growing food.

Are they efficient? They certainly produce the most, but that's a given considering they have 1.386 billion people to feed. Proportionally it's impossible to say if China is more or less efficient.

Re: How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?

#87

Post by nfoz »

bllguo wrote: post #46
dmix wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the first answer has “Western media won’t tell you this”. Like there’s some western conspiracy to downplay Chinese agriculture industry. The Chinese media is constantly telling their people that the US is plotting against China and is hostile to them, so the citizens don’t get any crazy ideas like democracy and human rights. While simultaneously amplifying the bad news coming out of America to show the ‘dangers’…

The tone is honestly understandable. It pains me to bring up this cliched point, but is the US media not constantly telling us that China is hostile, China is plotting? As someone with a foot in both worlds, US coverage of China is _at least_ equally warped. It's funny; to my parents and relatives in China I'm perceived as having a US bias, but everywhere else I get characterized as being too Chinese. It's hard for m…

> It's hard for me to emphasize enough how little typical Westerners understand about Asia.

I bet the typical human knows very little about life and culture outside of their specific environment. A typical city-dweller knows little about rural life even in their own region, and vice-versa.

It's weird how easily we fall into a trap of saying "look how ignorant x people are". I mean, of course, it's a big world, and we're busy, so it's pretty hard to not be ignorant.

Maybe a bigger mistake is thinking that "Media" (news etc?) is an education system. It's not and maybe it's not supposed to be. We need to come up with a better system/expectation/culture around continuous education, but even in the best case that can only apply to the subset of the population that has the time and resources and interest to take part.

Re: How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?

#88

Post by ForRealsies »

feral wrote: post #85
kartan wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "How are many national economies keeping innumerable people hungry, even though there's plenty of food to go around several times over?" I never see this question on TV. What I mainly see on Tv is talk about political strategies, result surveys and the like. Climate change is one of the few things that I see being discussed. And even that has a lot of this let's talk about politicians positions and poll results. I…

Opinion: The tough truth is that improving the world at that scale is mostly about politics. Politics is how the nations allocate resources to problems. You maybe want them to talk about the technical fundamentals of the problem but the important bit is usually the politics. [A sibling comment says to look at TED talks. This is an excellent idea. Then, after a couple of years, ask why none of the solutions have been…

The more jaded truth is that politics is downstream from culture. Politics is literally soundbytes and pictures.

Re: How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?

#89

Post by adrianN »

klenwell wrote: post #8

I see 3 sushi restaurants on the same street, start to extrapolate in my head, and wonder how we hadn't extinguished most edible fish species decades ago. From what I've read and heard on the subject, my understanding is: (1) some we have (touched upon at end of Jiro Dreams of Sushi, for example), (2) we are in the process of doing so to most the rest, (3) fish farms are increasingly making up the difference.

Farmed fish is not much better. It's still fed with fish and farms are really bad for the ecosystems around them (too many nutrients cause dead zones)

Re: How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?

#90

Post by saalweachter »

feral wrote: post #85
kartan wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "How are many national economies keeping innumerable people hungry, even though there's plenty of food to go around several times over?" I never see this question on TV. What I mainly see on Tv is talk about political strategies, result surveys and the like. Climate change is one of the few things that I see being discussed. And even that has a lot of this let's talk about politicians positions and poll results. I…

Opinion: The tough truth is that improving the world at that scale is mostly about politics. Politics is how the nations allocate resources to problems. You maybe want them to talk about the technical fundamentals of the problem but the important bit is usually the politics. [A sibling comment says to look at TED talks. This is an excellent idea. Then, after a couple of years, ask why none of the solutions have been…

In the 1950s, building a moonbase would have been an engineering and technological challenge.

Today, it's basically a political and economics challenge, to convince enough people it would be worth while to spend the time and effort to do it. Which is not to say there wouldn't be engineers involved, solving new problems, but we already know enough of the solutions that it's not really the sticking point now.

(Which is to agree with you, a lot of things are organizational problems at this point.)

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