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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?

#91

Post by coliveira »

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…

The main reason there is not enough food for everyone is that farmed land is hoarded by a few people, and agricultural production is targeted at crops with high market value. In other words, because agriculture is treated as an activity that must turn a profit, instead of a vital resource for the survival of the population in a country. Rich countries are able to subsidize their agriculture, but this is even more important in poor countries. In that case, starvation is the result of most internal agriculture being targeted at exports. Land owners can make a lot more money exporting their production to rich countries, where there is a large market for higher priced products, instead of the cheaper crops that could be sold internally.

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

#93

Post by RobertoG »

Shivetya wrote: post #74
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…

Well simple really, there are still many shitty governments out there and not much of anything that we can do about it. worse is when they get sufficient weaponry it pretty much puts them off limits for any intervention and in some cases lets them blackmail others. look at Venezuela and even North Korea, then look who supports these regimes that allow the governments of each to keep themselves in power. We cannot do…

You are probably very young if you believe that fantasy.

Who is this "we" that it's so worried about the welfare of humanity?

Read about the interventions of first Europe and then the USA in the global affairs.

You can check how sugar, then cotton and later oil interest have shaped the world. Or even fruit (1).

(1) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company

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

#94

Post by mandeepj »

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…

ha ha. What a logic to tackle a question - let's change the question itself. I guess you have never witnessed or heard about green revolution. Welcome to the real world.

> In most places in the world it's easy and cheap enough to produce food and distribute it.

source?

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

#95

Post by fspeech »

ArlenBales wrote: post #86
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.

They are more efficient (intensive) at output per acre, but (much) less efficient per unit labor. A more or less reasonable market allocation of resources would dictate a similar outcome with the relative abundance of labor (becoming less so, therefore also getting more capital intensive and more efficient on labor input) and scarcity of land per capita.

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

#96

Post by kaesar14 »

scarface74 wrote: post #36

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

What does this even mean? Almost 300 million people are agricultural workers in China, versus 6 million in the US. Despite that, we produce nearly the same quantity of food and export 140 billion dollars of food every year. The US has plenty of efficiency shortcomings, but in agriculture, the US agricultural sector is a modern marvel of engineering and efficiency.

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

#97

Post by rajeshp1986 »

I was really impressed by the top answer until I read this statement.

"I mean, the Chinese government has also forced Tibetans to build a massive amount of greenhouses on the Tibetan plateau. Those Tibetans have no time to go to temples for worshipping any more, instead, they have to work in the greenhouses taking care of tomatoes. This is why Dalai Lama is not so happy to hear this."

What??

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

#98

Post by cycrutchfield »

tepidandroid wrote: post #45
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of snide remarks in that answer, however, detracting from otherwise great information. (Eg what does the Dalai Lama and Uighur oppression have to do with this?)

> what does the Dalai Lama and Uighur oppression have to do with this The snark likely comes from the fact that Xinjiang is consistently portrayed in Western media as a nightmarish, dystopian, Orwellian hellhole suffering under the iron fisted oppression of the Communist Party. They ignore the very real benefits that have been afforded to millions of poverty-stricken people in Xinjiang via progressive government poli…

>They ignore the very real benefits that have been afforded to millions of poverty-stricken people in Xinjiang via progressive government policies, while tunnel visioning solely on human rights abuses.

And I'm sure that many folks made the argument that Africans working on plantations in the South had a higher standard of living than where they came from.

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

#99

Post by txcwpalpha »

nfoz wrote: post #87
bllguo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

I think this is certainly true, but at the same time, I've never met an American (even an otherwise 'uneducated' one), who was under the impression that London or Berlin are backwoods villages that struggle to keep the lights on, whereas I have certainly met people that think Hong Kong is. So then the question becomes "yes people are generally unaware, but what is it about Asia specifically that makes it seem like there is an even larger lack of awareness compared to somewhere like Europe?"

In regards to the rest of your comment: I wholeheartedly agree, but I don't think it comes down to "time or resources". Some of it does just come down to personal habits/preferences. Without passing any judgement, there are plenty of people who spend their evenings watching The Bachelorette when they could just as easily be using that time to watch The Travel Channel (or Discovery Channel if it was still actually educational), but they actively choose not to. I think that's a societal thing much more than it is a time or resources constraint.

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

#100

Post by choonway »

rajeshp1986 wrote: post #97

I was really impressed by the top answer until I read this statement. "I mean, the Chinese government has also forced Tibetans to build a massive amount of greenhouses on the Tibetan plateau. Those Tibetans have no time to go to temples for worshipping any more, instead, they have to work in the greenhouses taking care of tomatoes. This is why Dalai Lama is not so happy to hear this." What??

When I read this, I think back at the chaos in Hong Kong right now. I wonder what's going to happen in the weekend?
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