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The Coming Food Catastrophe

economist.com

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Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#301

Post by yakak »

paganel wrote: post #192
jakewins wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hypothetically, if the west actually wanted to give up sanctions in return for clearing the blockade.. why, in what universe, could they possibly expect Russia to stand by its word? Russia said for six months they were simply conducting exercises and had no intention of invading whatsoever. Why should anyone believe they would clear the blockade if sanctions lift?

If they don't stand by their word then they can re-impose the sanctions, it's as simple as that. > Why should anyone believe they would clear the blockade if sanctions lift Because at some point the West will have to sit at the negotiating table with Russia.

> Because at some point the West will have to sit at the negotiating table with Russia.

I hope not. I've really taken to the idea that China should manage their connections to the West and hopefully take a lot off the top until Putin is dead.

China not being a democracy doesn't seem to be a problem when it comes to institutional stabilities for managing NK. The US has done a lot worse with some of its dictator client states.

Sure if the Russians want to have another revolution and run new elections or something that's great but trying to get Russia to do something is like pushing against a horse. Lets let China push Russia and see what happens.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#302

Post by AussieWog93 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #144

The article actually has four solutions at the bottom. Compared to the severity of the problem, all four solutions are surprisingly simple. Not necessarily easy, but simple and straightforward. 1. Stop using so much corn to make ethanol. 2. Stop using so much seed oil to make biodiesel. 3. Stop feeding so much food to livestock. Bonus: reducing the livestock population provides short term calories! 4. Break the Black…

>1. Stop using so much corn to make ethanol.

>2. Stop using so much seed oil to make biodiesel.

Easier said than done when there's a global fuel shortage too!

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#303

Post by nradov »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #254
postalrat wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Triggering world war 3 would also help reduce the population which could reduce co2 emissions and food requirements. Killing a few birds with one stone.

This doesn't really make any sense though. It changes nothing about the geopolitical reality of what's going on. If the US sends a merchant ship and a cruiser, what is russia going to do exactly? Try to bomb the ships? They will lose, and get shot down. Why would it suddenly be WWIII? Is russia really going to say "Well, they shot down our plane so its global thermonuclear war time".

Russia might respond with conventional cruise missile strikes against US forces in the region.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#304

Post by Iwan-Zotow »

trhway wrote: post #283
corrral wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd take a lot of trucks and train cars to move one ship's worth of grain. Consider that highways, train lines, and ports don't necessarily have a ton of extra capacity available, for reasons of economy, that upgrading those takes time, and can be hard to finance if the situation is perceived to be temporary (so, may take significant government intervention to make it happen). Plus, you go to all the effort and expe…

Russia has already struck the Zatoka bridge south/west of Odessa, the best/shortest route from Odessa to Danube river and Black Sea ports in Romania. Most of the trains in Ukraine is electric-pulled. Russia has already struck most of the railway power transforming stations. Ukraine has very limited number of diesel trains. It can't use European ones because of different wheelbase. (correction thanks to the commenter…

> Russia has already stolen about 500 000 tons of wheat from Ukraine and delivered it to Assad

Well, no hunger for good people of Syria then

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#305

Post by Gordonjcp »

bequanna wrote: post #294
Gordonjcp wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3. If you can figure out how to eat grass, you'll be rich.

1. and 3. are the same thing: Corn. The trouble is that it is pretty damn tough to pivot from corn to some crop meant for direct human consumption. The machinery and infrastructure we have in place to grow, transport, and process corn is almost unimaginable in size. A pivot like this would require incredible gov't subsidies and take decades.

Yes, but feeding cows corn is silly. They can't digest it and you end up with bland greasy inedible meat, and corn is quite hard to grow.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#306

Post by corrral »

filoleg wrote: post #263
paganel wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly the US, with some UK mixed in. > A better term would be liberal democracies If you think "liberal democracies" still carries the same positive vibe across the world that it used to some years ago you are in for a big surprise. > "both sides are the same" ring to it They are definitely not the same, they have obviously different values. Again, Putin has said as much, he's the one fighting for a multi-polar worl…

> If you think "liberal democracies" still carries the same positive vibe across the world that it used to some years ago you are in for a big surprise. I mean, I agree that it doesn't carry the same positive vibes that it used to, but it still carries much better vibes than "corrupt authoritarian semi-dictatorships". To those who might try going "muh western propaganda" on this, save your time. I am speaking as some…

"Two cheers for democracy", as usual, to borrow Forster's words.

As he noted, it doesn't merit three cheers. Two, though? Maybe two.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#307

Post by AussieWog93 »

corrral wrote: post #175
mbg721 wrote: post #91

If you're in the West, it doesn't hurt to buy a couple big bags of rice from the local Indian market, and have some dried or canned beans handy, and cycle through them as you cook. A pallet of bottled water and a bag of charcoal don't hurt either. A dumb power outage or a downed wire or a tornado or something is much more likely than Red Dawn, but you'll still be happy to have all that.

Rice will be full of pest insect eggs. They'll hatch after a while (smallish count of months, likely). You've got to freeze it (to kill the eggs) and then seal it (to keep more pests from getting in) and/or add stuff that'll kill anything that hatches very fast (IIRC diatomaceous earth is popular for this) Other grains have similar pest problems, plus if it's wheat or similar and ground into flour (not e.g. whole whe…

What are you talking about? I've kept bags of rice for years without any issues.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#308

Post by nradov »

paganel wrote: post #197
UnFleshedOne wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another option for #4 is supplying enough long range anti-ship rockets to sink whole russian fleet in black sea. They can't bring in more ships, because turkey is blocking the entrance.

And then you have Russian aviation attacking and sinking Ukrainian merchant ships, plus a couple of submarines.

Ukraine doesn't have much of a merchant fleet. Most of their exports travel on foreign bottoms. And foreign ship owners are unwilling to risk entering an active conflict zone, especially because they can't obtain affordable insurance.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#309

Post by Gordonjcp »

kazinator wrote: post #285
Gordonjcp wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3. If you can figure out how to eat grass, you'll be rich.

Surely, we must know how to do this. I mean, we know how grass-eating ruminants break down the cellulose to obtain energy with various enzymes and whatnot. We could probably invent some kind of exo-stomach to pre-digest grass into an edible state. :)

I guess if you really wanted to, you could take cellulase in the way that people can take lactase to mitigate the effects of lactose intolerance.

How you'd actually get your stomach to brew that up into anything useful in time is anyone's guess, and what it would do to the rest of you is an exercise for the keen experimenter.

We are basically too active and too large to eat grass, even if we had lactase.

Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe

#310

Post by sva_ »

corrral wrote: post #248
sva_ wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm ignorant of this, but it was my impression that vacuum-sealed white rice should pretty much last indefinitely?

I'd expect a couple years at least. A quick Google gives common wisdom that you still want anti-weevil measures (bay leaves in the bag, the aforementioned diatomaceous earth) with that method. My point with that part was just that you have to do the vacuum sealing (unless you're buying a product with all this taken care of, which I'd assume is expensive) and such, at least, which means more equipment and material tha…

Maybe the misunderstanding stems from a geographic difference. The rice I buy seems to come in an under a co2-atmosphere vacuum sealed bag that costs around $2 (or less on sale) per kg.

> What they were into, big time, was canning vegetables,

My grandmother did this too, after living her childhood through WW2 (in Germany), she used to have a repository of canned vegetables in the cellar. I sometimes talked to her about her rural live in the war-torn country, and she told me about soldiers, and all kinds of people, who would come by in war-time, where food was very sparse. And I think she maintained that sort of hoarding behavior throughout her life, based on the experiences she made as a child.

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