How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people? • Hacker News Board

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

#331

Post by jolmg » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 8:45 PM UTC

kortilla wrote: post #311

jolmg wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't the fact that they're subsidized to keep them from collapsing due to low prices mean the opposite of it being easy and cheap? If the subsidies were removed, the farmers/etc would need to raise their prices to pay for whatever the subsidies paid. That new higher price would reflect the real cost of production. The subsidies are there to keep prices low and accessible despite a higher cost of production.

Yep, but small nit. Farmers don’t really “raise their prices”. With commodities you can’t really raise your prices. You either sell at the market price or sit on it. And sitting on it is really dangerous with perishable commodities. Look at mines, oil companies, etc for other examples of industries with participants lacking the ability to raise their prices.

Yes, that's why the subsidies are there, to keep them from collapsing. Raising their prices when the subsidies are removed is a hypothetical scenario to highlight what the real cost of production probably is. In reality, they'd probably realize that it's hopeless to even try.

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

#332

Post by intended » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 8:45 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #329

intended wrote: post #265

Yeah sorry - that answer is the sort that glosses over a huge amount of facts to present a clean a-b-c dependency tree along side a decent heap of sino philia. So in particular the point on fish farms- fish farms are hard , the fish need many different things to be happy and not sick or affected by parasites. This means medicines, treatment and more - further this is only viable if you have transportation, refrigerat…

> Voting behavior and soft shilling of the poster in the thread is also pretty odd I'm not sure if you're talking about the HN thread, but such insinuations break the site guidelines here. Experience has shown that the vast majority are imaginary. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html I've written about this a great deal for anyone who wants more explanation: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=a…

Apologies dang. I had made the comment with awareness of the rule, and thought I had reason to be confident. However Based in your reply, I can edit my comment and remove the offending section.

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

#333

Post by kortilla » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 9:43 PM UTC

JDiculous wrote: post #248

TimTheTinker wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Politics is how the nations allocate resources to problems. That's a hard pill to swallow, but I fear you're right. Shouldn't government's priorities be establishing rule of law, courts & justice, national defense, and regulating commerce? How did massive taxes, a huge budget, and political fights over resource allocation ever get thrown into the mix? A historian once said that democracy fails when people begin vot…

Why should maximizing the well-being of the people not be a government priority? Any system, including someone's anarcho-capitalist fantasy, determines allocation of resources. Some are just more humanitarian than others.

Because it’s a fantasy to think there is even agreement on what “maximizing the well-being” means. The people running the re-education camps in China probably even think they are doing that.

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

#334

Post by kortilla » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 9:48 PM UTC

charlesju wrote: post #142

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…

You might be interested in supporting Andrew Yang: https://www.yang2020.com/ All he talks about is the problem of resource redistribution through the means of a basic income, $1000/month to every citizen!

It’s too bad his arguments for basic income aren’t backed by better arguments. His whole example of his wife not being valued by the market makes no sense because personal caretakers are super expensive on the market.

They just chose as a couple to have her take care of her own son as a caretaker instead of her working and them hiring. That’s not a failure of the market anymore than the market not valuing my car because I refuse to sell it.

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

#335

Post by staplor » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 10:23 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #192

staplor wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the link and then delete your comment.

This comment breaks the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . Please don't be a jerk on HN.

Thank you for the reply. Won't do it again.

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

#336

Post by Inu » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 11:13 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #330

Inu wrote: post #266

The author's answer to the question 'How do mainland Chinese feel about the protests in Hong Kong on the extradition law amendment?': https://www.quora.com/How-do-mainland-Chinese-feel-about-the...

" Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html The last thing we need is for a thread about food production to get sucked into the nearest black hole, which is precisely what comments like this one invoke. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=com…

As others have pointed out, the original article features an ideological undercurrent that remains mostly implicit. I referred to another article of the same author which makes those ideological assumptions explicit, thereby clarifying his political stance. If this is considered flamebait, then it seems that clarity needs to be avoided where it might cause controvery.

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

#337

Post by homakov » Sat, Jul 27, 2019, 11:13 PM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #215

homakov wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is up to their alley. Giving birth to less children, raising them better, solving poverty. Knowing Bangladesh, unlikely

It's all but certainly too late for birthrate changes alone to reduce population within the anticipated timeframe. That leaves emigration or mortality increases, barring further food miracles.

Yes, regards water level it won't do much (I missed parent's point), but it doesn't hurt to have less children and give them better education vs the way it is now.

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

#338

Post by qarlow » Sun, Jul 28, 2019, 12:10 AM UTC

mistermann wrote: post #328

qarlow wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is sort of the thing. It isn't so much that people don't know as that it doesn't register as important. Hans Rosling ended up devoting much of his life promoting a fact based view of the world after learning first hand that some of the absolute top students in Sweden had an obsolete world view. The West is used to being "the first world" were most important things happen. But increasingly we are the ones "on the…

> In most of the West large government programs aren't on the table, so that doesn't register as important to us. I am not even sure there is much that can be done about it. It is literally history in the making really. Well said....I'd agree that not much can be done based on the current nature of both political and public/personal discourse, but can the quality of this discourse not be improved? From where I sit, t…

> I'd agree that not much can be done based on the current nature of both political and public/personal discourse, but can the quality of this discourse not be improved?

Probably. But I also don't think the discourse matter as much as it used to. It used to be that to have a voice you had to build something. So the discourse was meaningful as in reflected what was going to happen. Today everyone has a voice and therefor the discourse more reflects whatever people want it to be but not necessarily what happens. That is why we can discuss things seemingly forever while they largely remain the same.

In that sense I think Rosling was right in refusing to be negative. Not, as some people think, because he thought everything was getting better but to show that they could better. When you provide your own signal with substance other people's promises or dismissals become less relevant.

The really hard part is that the West has increasingly lost the narrative. So now we have to translate what China does to our own environment. We want the long term thinking, investment and development but not the authoritarianism.

Which is what China did with the whole "Chinese capitalism". No longer did they have to come up with things from scratch in their own system, but could translate from the Western narrative by buying companies or technologies.

So you have to find a way to show people that it can be done in a way that fits into their narrative by taking their concerns seriously.

But honestly for some countries it might be too late. I believe in fairness as something to strive for, but from a greater perspective reality doesn't really care what people think or how things should be. Countries who can't provide things that matter are going to lose, unless they can come up with something else. Which would probably be war, so they still lose.

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

#339

Post by dang » Sun, Jul 28, 2019, 12:29 AM UTC

Inu wrote: post #336

dang wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html The last thing we need is for a thread about food production to get sucked into the nearest black hole, which is precisely what comments like this one invoke. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=com…

As others have pointed out, the original article features an ideological undercurrent that remains mostly implicit. I referred to another article of the same author which makes those ideological assumptions explicit, thereby clarifying his political stance. If this is considered flamebait, then it seems that clarity needs to be avoided where it might cause controvery.

Let's assume that's so—what does it matter? The article was interesting for reasons other than its implicit ideology. Making it explicit so as to fight it is stepping into the ideological battle that we don't want here. We have more than enough of that. Everything is implicitly ideological anyway.

Re "avoiding clarity": if you change the subject, that deprives the thread of clarity on the points that actually made it interesting. And if you change it to a flamewar, that just fills the comments with fire and smoke, which does nothing for clarity. It just gets people venting and yelling at each other.

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

#340

Post by pms » Sun, Jul 28, 2019, 12:54 AM UTC

dgellow wrote: post #308

edwinyzh wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freedom of speech and I guess HN is an international community? On the post, as the author said, seeing is believing. Whether or not it's CCP propaganda, it's facts.

“Seeing is believing” really doesn’t make any sense in the modern world. And facts don’t exist in a vacuum, they are presented with a specific narrative, some are just omitted, some are plain lies (China bringing joy to Tibet population by providing better food, really?).

I find it informative to see other points of view and an impressive number of facts that are presented in this Quora answer, rather than just the Western point of view, which arguably could be also called as "propaganda". Let's not go this route.