
Is the world’s food system collapsing? - prakash
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2008/05/19/080519crat_atlarge_wilson?currentPage=all
======
hugh
Usually I hate these one-word unjustified responses, but today I'm gonna have
to go with:

No.

I wish I could provide some kind of rebuttal of the points made in the
article, but unfortunately the article really doesn't seem to make any points.
It's just a series of quotes from crazy people who tell us we're all going to
die without providing much justification other than "climate change, man!"

Oh, okay, there's a fair point about overfishing.

"All of these authors agree that the entire system of Western food production
is in need of radical change, right down to the spinach. Roberts opens with a
description of E.-coli-infected spinach from California, which killed three
people in 2006 and sickened two hundred others."

Another of my pet peeves is when people criticize the "Western" system of
doing something without providing any contrast with an "Eastern" way of doing
it. Is the Eastern system of food production better? Are there fewer cases of
food poisoning from contaminated food in Asia? I don't think so.

~~~
ibsulon
So, then, there weren't food riots in Haiti? We aren't seeing inflation in
food costs squeeze out the bottom 20% of the world?

~~~
helveticaman
Malthus is coming back after his 250 year vacation.

[http://www.economist.com/books/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=...](http://www.economist.com/books/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=9644636)

------
davidw
Doom and gloom titles are such linkbait:-/

Oh, and BTW, no:
[http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1...](http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11374623)

~~~
hello_moto
While it's true, doom-n-gloom title can also be used to trigger human's fear.

Take rice as an example. Right now fund managers are "toying" the price of
rice by:

1) Buying all of them in the market

2) Hold it from circulation

3) Spread the doom-n-gloom via newspaper and stuffs by saying that "Rice is
scarce".

4) In turn, we, regular people, got so scared and bought rice at a higher
price.

5) Fund managers sell these rice at higher price

6) Time goes profit comes

7) Once they had enough, they'll return the price to a stable point.

Don't you love George Soros?

~~~
davidw
Sources? Mine say that only 5-7% of rice is even traded across borders, so I
think your story looks a bit dubious:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice#World_production_and_trade>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_shortage>

------
bigtoga
And this is on YC why?

Stop upvoting/commenting/clicking on these and maybe they'll go away.

~~~
mtts
Because hackers might also care about the world around them, that's why.

~~~
davidw
Bad answer. That opens up the site to anything and everything. I care deeply
about the ongoing Giro d'Italia, and if all goes well, will go watch a stage
in the near future, but I wouldn't post daily results on this site. Nor would
I attempt to inflict my own political and economic views on the other users.
Were we all to do that, the site would rapidly degrade.

~~~
edw519
I thought it was an excellent answer.

Hacker News IS my portal now, and if an occasional piece not directly related
to hacking spawns excellent discussion among my peers, great. That's something
I'd probably find nowhere else.

As far as the "appropriateness" of submissions, just trust the rest of us to
prudently use our up arrows. Sure, stupid stuff will get through, but a small
price to pay for good content and discussion.

Oh, and go ahead and submit a Giro d'Italia post. Not sure it would see too
many upvotes.

~~~
davidw
Are any of these discussions actually that interesting? They all seem to turn
into "market-will-fix-everything libertarians vs OMG evil corporations!!!
types". Ok, that's a little bit of a caricature, but not too far off the mark,
and in any case the whole thing is a slippery slope into territory that's not
really about hacking or hackers or startups.

------
xirium
From the article: In his treatise, Malthus couldn’t envisage any innovations
for increasing yield beyond “dressing” the soil with cattle manure. In the
decades after he wrote, farmers in England took advantage of new machinery,
powerful fertilizers, and higher-yield seeds, and supply rose faster than
demand.

I believe that due to mechanised food production and distribution, it takes 10
calories of oil to put one calorie on your plate. If oil becomes more
expensive then food becomes more expensive. In a global market, the poorest
lose. Governments have ringfenced rice for domestic consumption and supply and
demand has cause huge rises in export prices. There's no safeguard to prevent
this happening next to potatoes or wheat.

------
edw519
While we are consumed with worring about our "carbon footprints" and "miles
per gallon", I wonder what an analysis of our "accomplishments per calorie"
would reveal.

Scary times, indeed.

<returns to sofa with bag of chips>

~~~
donw
You could drive your personal quotient through the roof if you switched to
celery...

------
DaniFong
"First, the underlying cause of any shortage is the lack of a free market,
since genuine shortages cannot appear in a free market."

What?

------
wumi
PG says he likes going after big, bad corporations and monopolies ...

A YC company to revolutionize the food industry?? :)

~~~
eru
You'd have to sideline a lot of regulation and subsidies.

But it might just be doable.

~~~
mtts
Actually, regulation and subsidies can be _good_ for food production. They
give farmers a fighting chance against big food corporations, which helps the
food supply because while a small farm may not be profitable without
government subsidies, it _is_ better at producing more calories per square
meter of land under cultivation.

Take, for example, green house tomatoes. They grow to enormous sizes
exceedingly quickly so they're profitable, but, as anyone who's ever grown a
single tomato plant on a balcony can testify, they have absolutely zero taste
and rather limited nutritional value compared to the real thing. Likewise, as
was touched upon in the article, high quality poultry is far more nourishing
than industrially produced chicken breasts that consist mostly of water.

Government subsidies allow farmers to continue producing high quality produce
locally, even if it is in a manner that is, from a free market point of view,
inefficient.

~~~
anamax
How many govt regulations favor the politically weak over the politically
powerful?

I like computer games more than tomatoes. Why shouldn't the govt subsidize my
preferences?

I've no objection to you buying whatever food, from whatever source, you'd
like, but why shouldn't you pay for it? I'm perfectly willing to take the same
deal wrt my food, video games, etc.

~~~
mtts
The point is that food is not video games. Food is a necessity for survival,
unlike video games, and one that isn't best produced by the free market.

If farmers are not subsidized, you get things like the current food crisis:
big companies squeeze out poor third world farmers, then food becomes more
expensive to produce so the big companies, who care about profit more than
farming, decide to produce less of it to drive up prices, resulting in a food
shortage in the third world, one that the third world can't solve anymore
because its farmers are bankrupt (short version).

Add to that the fact that the food produced by free market forces is often of
dubious quality and nutritional value and it becomes clear, to me, that maybe
farm subsidies are the lesser of two evils.

I agree with you, however, that the government shouldn't subsidize video
games. Or most other things.

~~~
jacobolus
> _If farmers are not subsidized, you get things like the current food
> crisis:_

Actually one of the biggest problems we face today is that American
corn/wheat/soybean farmers are very heavily subsidized, and it threw the whole
global agricultural system out of kilter.

> _big companies, who care about profit more than farming, decide to produce
> less of it to drive up prices, resulting in a food shortage in the third
> world,_

They aren’t intentionally driving up prices, no. But that _is_ the effect of
turning large amounts of corn into ethanol.

> _Add to that the fact that the food produced by free market forces is often
> of dubious quality and nutritional value_

None of our current food is “produced by free market forces” so this is merely
speculative.

~~~
mtts
First of all, the corn / ethanol thing. That gets thrown about a lot, but it's
not true. Only about 2% of the world's crop yield is used for biofuel
production. So that by itself can't explain the current food crisis (which is
real, but only if you live in the third world).

Second of all, I should have been clearer that I meant that _third world_
farmers should be subsidized. It's the only way for them to survive the
onslaught of western multi billion agricultural companies like Monsanto, which
for a large part of their production certainly are not subsidized at all
(though you're right about American corn/wheat/soybean farmers : American
agriculture combines the worst of the European system - aggressive subsidies -
with the worst of commercial aggriculture - inefficient production - from a
nutritional point of view).

Third, American food is in fact produced by free market forces. It's the
export to the rest of the world that is subsidized. Locally, small American
farmers have been, for a large part, replaced by large agricultural
conglomerates simply because those can create a large profit and buy up farm
land even if the quality of their produce is at the very least debatable.
European subsidies, on the other hand, go directly to farmers, allowing them
to at least supply their home markets with plentiful food of often reasonably
high quality.

The drawback of both systems is that food exports from the west (be they
subsidized directly the way American food exports are or indirectly, the way
European farm produce is) is that it destroys third world agriculture, which
the IMF does not allow its governments to subsidize, either directly or
indirectly by slapping import tariffs on food imports to offset the subsidies
of the western governments.

Seeing as that this is the case (and a major reason for the food crisis) it
seems to me not unreasonable to allow third world governments to subsidize as
well to make the playing field somewhat level again.

A better idea would of course be to not subsidize at all but I don't see the
US give up its export subsidies and, especially, the EU give up its farm
subsidies anytime soon.

~~~
anamax
(1) Where are these third world countries supposed to get the money to
subsidize agriculture? Is spending it on agriculture subsidies really the best
thing that they could do? (2) Unless they're also paying the subsidy, a
subsidy from the consumer's point of view is exactly the same as buying from a
more efficient producer who passes on the savings. Lower costs allow said
consumer to spend money on other things. This is good.

The US became better off when it needed fewer people to produce food because
those people produced wealth. If the US and the EU insist on providing cheap
food, third world countries can use the savings to produce other things that
they need.

~~~
eru
Yes. That's exactly the reason why each country can and should get rid of
subsidies and tariffs on its own.

------
ivankirigin
If fertilizer were made from Oil, I'd be concerned. But other, more abundant
hydrocarbons power the green revolution.

~~~
joshwa
Well, one major component is Natural Gas or Coal:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process>

> The Haber process now produces 100 million tons of nitrogen fertilizer per
> year, mostly in the form of anhydrous ammonia, ammonium nitrate, and urea.
> 3-5% of world natural gas production is consumed in the Haber process (~1-2%
> of the world's annual energy supply). That fertilizer is responsible for
> sustaining one-third of the Earth's population...

This actually doesn't take into account the energy to bring the components to
the high temperatures required, either, usually supplied by electricity.

The output:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UAN>

~~~
ivankirigin
Natural Gas and coal are good to go for centuries. That's my point.

