The luddites food requirements didn’t provide them with popular support.

Similarly US agricultural output could be cut in half without serious negative consequences. Far more corn ends up as ethanol than our food and we export vast quantities of highly subsidized food to zero benefit. Hell ethanol production costs as much in fossil fuels as we get ethanol from it, it’s literally pure wasted effort.

Rational policy would create a large scale food shortage and then let market forces take over. We could have 10 years of food on hand for every American at way less expensive than current policy with the added benefit of vastly reducing the negative externalities of farming such as depleting aquifers.

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fc417fc802 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Be careful with the assumptions you're making. A risk management strategy, for example, will often appear to be of zero benefit except in the case where shit hits the fan. We can stop feeding cattle, producing ethanol, and whatever else overnight in the event that something happens.

> Rational policy would create a large scale food shortage and then let market forces take over.

Well I'm just going to state that I'm _really_ happy that you're not the one in charge and leave it at that.

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Retric 4 days ago | parent [-]

You may be happy with the current status but it’s actually both risky and expensive.

Risk management means managing risks, there’s plenty of things having more farmland doesn’t actually protect you from. On the other hand having a decade of food protects you from basically everything as you get time to adjust as things change.

Just as an example, meteor strike blocks sunlight and farmland is useless for a few years. Under the current system most of us starve to death. Odds are around 1 in 1 million that it happens in a given lifetime, but countries outlive people start thinking longer term and it becomes more likely.

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fc417fc802 4 days ago | parent [-]

I fully support having huge stockpiles in addition to subsidies. There's a lot of things midway on the scale between "business as usual" and "meteor strike" where minimizing supply chain disruptions would likely prove to be of great benefit.

I completely agree that the current way things are being handled appears to have its share of problems and could stand to be better optimized. But that doesn't mean it's useless either.

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Retric 4 days ago | parent [-]

Subsidies as a concept includes spending 1% as much on subsidies. Subsidies as they exist now however are a specific system that’s incredibly wasteful.

Producing dramatically less food and ending obesity are linked. If the average American eats 20% less obesity would still be an issue, but that’s a vast amount of farmland we just don’t need.

The current system isn’t designed to accommodate increased agricultural production, lowering food demands, or due to decreasing fertility the slow decline in global population. Instead the goal is almost completely to get votes from farmers.

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fc417fc802 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

You want to solve obesity by ... making food cost more? Assuming I've understood you correctly then I think it would be difficult for us to be more opposed to one another. I want basic necessities to be as cheap as possible. Preferably free.

I'm happy to debate what sort of free food the government should or shouldn't be handing out, what measures could be put in place to minimize waste, etc. But from my perspective the ideal is a free all you can eat buffet that's backed by the government.

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Retric 3 days ago | parent [-]

No, I’m saying solving obesity reduces the need for food. Did you not see the post directly below this one posted 6+ hours before your comment where I said:

“For clarity, Ozempic etc have actually measurably decreased food consumption.”

Technology isn’t going backwards, we can expect increasingly effective medications with fewer side effects at lower costs to drive down food demand over time. Policies designed to prop up production in the face of falling demand are deeply flawed.

If you want to give people money, give them money, don’t give them lots of money so they can keep a little bit while they waste resources producing something without value.

	▲	fc417fc802 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Apologies, I saw it at the time but failed to follow. IIUC you're saying that subsidies will tend to ratchet in only the one direction. To be clear I don't object at all to the idea of optimizing how subsidies are determined. I just don't think that subsidies and the resultant overproduction are a bad thing in general. I'm all for efficiency in the general case but I think a fair amount of paranoia is called for regarding long tail scenarios that lead to famine.

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Retric 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

For clarity, Ozempic etc have actually measurably decreased food consumption. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00222437251412834

Obviously that impacts food demand.

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theamk 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I am not sure at all how would we stockpile 10 years of food for each American - most of the kinds of food cannot be kept for that long. And what can be kept is unlikely to make a balanced diet.

Moreover, I am not sure how long will it take to re-build the farm industry if most farms will close. I think "10 years" is too optimistic, given how many farms will need to be spun up.

	▲	Retric 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		A stockpile of 10 years of food isn’t the same thing as 10 years of the modern American diet. Don’t expect veal from a government warehouse. That said, we can preserve viable sperm for 50+ years. https://www.techexplorist.com/worlds-oldest-semen-still-viab... Maintaining nutritional content isn’t a major hurdle.

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AngryData 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

You could revert to a granary system, but the whole point of farming subaidization was to leave the granary system that repeatedly throughout history ended up with massive famine and starvations.

Stored food is not bullet proof, and takes up a lot more bulk space than you may think. It can also take numerous years to ramp up farming production in response to a drop in yields or disaster.

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Retric 4 days ago | parent [-]

We’re vastly better at food preservation, farming, and birth control today.

Suggesting we’ll run into the same issues as people before the green revolution is ignoring the progress of technology.

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AngryData 4 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah its better, but it is still far from perfect. You aren't going to increase farm tractor or farm implement production by 50% with a year or twos notice. Some crops like fruits takes years to establish, and unused farmland quickly succumbs to nature and starts growing trees. And if that field wasn't clear 5 years ago you now have to stump grind or bulldoze the fields because tree stumps and tree roots will mess up your farm equipment, doubly worse if its some super massive tractor and implement setup that would normally be the most productive.

And there is also all the political and financial barriers to taking unfarmed land and very quickly turning it into farmland. Who owns it and who owned it before? Who with the right knowledge to manage it properly will run it? What about other problems around them that are part to the famine.

And farming in itself is not very predictable business. Yields regularly vary by 30% just due to local weather without being considered unusual. Return on investments may be a decade down the road even if everything is done perfect. Getting people to invest long term for a potentially very short term problem is not super easy.

We got surviving rations from back in the US civil war that are still edible, but people still regularly starved and had famines despite massive leaps in food preservation technology. Hermetically sealing just a single persons food for a year is not an easy task, not to mention hundred million+.

	▲	Retric 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Economies of scale are huge here. You can store well below -40 when you're talking food for 100 million people, that just doesn’t work well when you’re talking one person. Of note I didn’t say a year or 2’s notice 10 years of food on hand would be fairly cheap and we currently have the surplus to hit that number quickly. And that’s for 100% replacement, most situations aren’t going to drop food production to zero giving us more time.