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Seems like you don't know the meaning of "all-in"?
That said, if you're desperate for someone to point fingers at, might I suggest Putin’s Russia and her war of aggression?
The Coming Food Catastrophe
201–210 of 634 posts
Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe
#202What nobody understands is that this is not happening strictly because of the war or the drought, but because of the fragility of the global food system, which simply cannot bear any shocks. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/2/02... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1712-3 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/19/banks-... We either fix this or we simply won't have a global…
What you're missing is that the global food system is under attack by bad actors. 1. The US Treasury drew up the list of economic sanctions against Russia and Belarus. Then they pressured the compliant EU to follow. The sanctions no surprises had a predictable impact on global grain/fertilizer and energy supply prices. The US basically sanctioned themselves and the global economy. 2. Meanwhile China was hit by terrib…
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Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Re 4., that's doable if the West renounces some of its existing economic sanctions against Russia, the Russians themselves have said as much recently. It probably won't happen because the West doesn't like to see itself as being involved in the war (in a way similar to what Russia thinks about itself) and will try to resort to "Russia should unlock the blockade purely on humanitarian grounds!", which, of course, is t…
What is "the west" exactly? Japan? New Zealand? Finland? Tunisia? A better term would be liberal democracies, but that wouldn't have quite the same "both sides are the same" ring to it, would it? Russia isn't waging an economic war against anyone. A dictator tried to invade his democratic neighbour, he failed, and now the other democraties are cutting him out of their club
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 world with multi-polar values, so to speak. I think the same holds for Xi, in China.
Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
These are part of a propaganda strategy to make people feel like they're "helping". They are not an effective or efficient way of improving food availability. If you enjoy gardening as a hobby, that's great, but these are not practical bulwarks against food shortages. The economies of scale in industrial farming are insane. The ROI on a personal garden is abysmally low, except for herbs and other low-volume plants.
> The economies of scale in industrial farming are insane. The ROI on a personal garden is abysmally low, except for herbs and other low-volume plants. So I read this book called "How Asia Works" which documented the economic transformations of a few different Asian countries. I was shocked to learn that in a lot of cases, the industrial farming not the huge boon that was expected efficiently a few people can grow th…
It can't slide back because 99%+ of people don't want to live like peasants of 100 years ago. I hope I don't need to explain why having a lot more people spending a lot of their time farming small plots leads to a substantially lower standard of living than an industrial or post-industrial economy.
Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe
#205The 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…
If they can ship the food to Odessa (presumably by truck or train), it seems like they would be able to ship it to a port in a non-blockaded foreign country instead (e.g. Turkey, Greece, Italy, Poland).
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 expense of doing that, then Russia hits a few important bridges on the Ukraine side of your routes, and now you're back to nearly-zero capacity.
Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
These are part of a propaganda strategy to make people feel like they're "helping". Depends whether you're gardening for a global food shortage, or to supplement your own use, which I suspect is why most people have home gardens. A home garden can supply a significant fraction of your food - especially if you do canning or otherwise preserve for winter use. From the link in the parent post: Fruit and vegetables harve…
> Depends whether you're gardening for a global food shortage, or to supplement your own use No, the effect on supply is the same. > A home garden can supply a significant fraction of your food It takes 5+ acres in a decently arable region with fertilizer to feed one person. By the time you're providing for a significant fraction of your caloric intake, it ceases to be a "garden". > an amount equal to all commercial…
> It takes 5+ acres in a decently arable region with fertilizer to feed one person. By the time you're providing for a significant fraction of your caloric intake, it ceases to be a "garden".
I'm sorry, but I just can't believe that. Is that fudged to account for livestock or waste or something? A single acre is what, 40*100m? That's huge, you could feed a whole family all year on potatoes, peanuts, greens, squash etc
Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe
#207Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't argue against the research but to me, the "global food system" is much more robust than I imagined. We stayed in our homes for months en mass without prep time and prior warning and the food availability barely changed. We are creatures that need to eat multiple times a day and yet we can stay in our homes for months and get fed just as well. Therefore I'm not very worried about the management of the food…
We are extremely good at it is your take when 900 million people don't get to eat even in times of abundance? If our food system can't take a little bit of war and drought imagine how will it fare when production starts falling. Climate change is happening at global scale, and we must be able to coordinate and innovate on a similar scale to be able to handle it. Instead we have a spontaneously formed a shitty system.…
The people who go hungry are the ones who are NOT well connected to the global supply chain.
Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your local zoning board might object. I live in PA, and one of the neighborhood vigilantes immediately ratted me out to the local government when I started growing corn, squash, and beans in my backyard while raising a couple of chickens for eggs.
It also takes well over an acre to support a single person, and that's if you know what you're doing and have the time to manage a garden of that size.
An acre seems excessive. An acre is 43,560 square feet.
"One 4 × 4 Square Foot Garden box (16 square feet) will supply enough produce to make a salad for one adult every day of the growing season." [0]
0. Bartholomew, Mel. All New Square Foot Gardening, 3rd Edition, Fully Updated: MORE Projects NEW Solutions GROW Vegetables Anywhere (p. 61). Cool Springs Press. Kindle Edition.
Re: The Coming Food Catastrophe
#210Sounds like there's a big potential for upheavals similar to the Arab Spring. A fair number of countries subsidize food for their citizens, and if they can't get their hands on any, there's going to be issues. I wonder which countries are most at risk? I read somewhere that the Arab countries get a lot of Ukrainian wheat.
That’s probably mainly due to low shipping costs due to proximity (in the grand scheme of things). There is scope for substitution with supplies from elsewhere in the world, if those supplies can be freed up from their usual end use. Biodiesel, cattle feed, etc. Here in the UK restrictions on labelling sunflower oil now mean it’s acceptable to adulterate it with other oils. My family has switched to using rapeseed oi…
I'm not sure why sunflower oil is so popular. Olive oil is much nicer for anything that isn't going to be deep-fried, and peanut oil is much better for frying (more saturated fats = more crispiness).