281–290 of 589 posts
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So we should continue exploiting, is what you are saying?
I am not thrilled about the situation, but the alternative, unfortunately, is far worse. The people in Ukraine/Moldova etc. will go deeper into poverty, and people in the west will have to contend with sky-high inflation.
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> It's the consequence of having an export-oriented economy: labour must at all cost be as low as possible. In what type of economy would that not be the case then?
If you’re not export oriented, you need more consumer purchasing power, so higher wages.
Since restaurants are one of the major sources of food going to trash, I was wondering whether the current crisis would not actually have an opposite effect with more food being on the market. Sure, not all types of food but on the other hand people have been buying a lot of nonperishable goods from what i have seen last few weeks which would also indicate lower demand in the near future.
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> I mean, the market does. Most people won't pay an 50% on food because the farmers pay a living wage. I always get a chuckle hearing this talk from the sort of people pushing for $15/hr fast food wages.
Why do you get a chuckle? Can you explain?
Hopefully this may incentivize people to be a bit more self-sufficient. Gardens that you grow your own, allotments - the mentality of that has been driven away over decades and now people are starting to smell the roses and realize they can't eat them. So in many avenues - complacency gets highlighted more and I'm sure many and much will change on the back of this period in time. Overall I'd say for the better. Certa…
This is a very naive take on the world. You'll need at the very least half an acre to feed yourself sustainably, and that's if you're highly optimized. It's also backbreaking work, and you won't be able to do much else except subsistence farming. In short, it's not practical for the vast majority of the population. The closest we can probably get to this model is instead CSA memberships, supporting farms right outsid…
Since restaurants are one of the major sources of food going to trash, I was wondering whether the current crisis would not actually have an opposite effect with more food being on the market. Sure, not all types of food but on the other hand people have been buying a lot of nonperishable goods from what i have seen last few weeks which would also indicate lower demand in the near future.
Is that the case? I would have assumed that restaurant kitchens are a lot better at avoiding wastage and random spoilage than home cooks. I guess there's left-overs, but you'd also have that at home.
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Why have eastern europeans do the work instead of the normal workers? It's not like eastern europeans have any special resistance to corona, nor are their lives worth less.
nobody has to do the work, the work is voluntary. Eastern Europeans do the work because the wages are still higher than in Eastern Europe, so it makes financial sense for them to move to the UK. In contrast to the exploitation narrative this is actually mutually beneficial. The food is produced at low cost which is good for consumers (in particular poor ones who would otherwise not have access to expensive vegetables…
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China imports a gigantic amount of food, and ports were first to be hit by disruption . As a person who works in OEM electronics in China, I can tell at least that. So, at any normal day, China would've been eating 30-32% of world's food by value, while producing 20% of it by itself. Agriculture has been on shutdown for the past 2.5 months. Farms have slaughtered a large portion of their livestock, and a big portion…
> China would've been eating 30-32% of world's food by value, while producing 20% of it by itself References? And of course, that is by value... I’m in NZ and it’s been in the news about how our our crayfish (lobster in US) exports to China crashed, but that’s a high value food. China imports a lot of “unnecessary” luxury foods from NZ (deer, fruit, salmon, mussels, etc), although I don’t know anything about volumes…
Coworkers in Shenzhen are already saying that more fancier foods are already getting scarcer in the inland China, and prices are going up by day. China has done a massive livestock slaughter campaign when the quarantine was declared. That has actually depressed the food prices quite a bit for the first months, but after that, the prices have shot up. This is how they got that much meat: https://mustsharenews.com/wp-c…
If your daily meal is mostly rice with some vegetables, then cutting down on production means famine.
If your daily meat is processed meat, then cutting down on production means slaughtering the animal stock and processing the soy/corn/etc for human consumption.
It's also good that in the northern hemisphere, where most people live, we can still choose what crops to prioritize for the 2020 harvest; there's some lock-in with specialized hardware and availability of seed stock, but in general we can adapt quite a lot still.