I think the last couple of years is a wake-up call for the neo-liberal order.
Before, it was cool to talk about efficiency and how backward it was for countries to try to protect domestic industries instead of just allow “free trade”.
However, the last few years have illustrated that if you don’t have domestic production of essentials, then you are going to be hurting. Look at the early Covid pandemic and the shortage of face masks and other protective equipment. Look at vaccine production and how countries that could manufacture the vaccine prioritized domestic distribution first. Look now at global food supply and how countries as limiting exports of their grains.
The last decade or so is a story about countries and companies pursuing “efficiency” at the expense of increased fragility. Going forward, I think you will see more companies taking a larger role to make sure critical production capabilities stay domestic.
Thought experiment: why doesn't the United States have something like 20 years worth of calories for every American stockpiled by now? I'm more than half-serious. Skim a few percent surplus of stable oils and dried peas over the years, build up a reserve, stick them in vaults in Montana and Virginia. The cost would be quite small, even trivial, in the grand scheme of things.
What if there's a volcanic eruption and we spend half a decade in semi-darkness? Our civilization probably could survive that if we prepared. And we know something of that scale happens every few thousand years. We have more potential for reserve capacity than ever and yet we run on razor-thin margins even for the basics of life.
I'm concerned the neoliberal notion of "efficiency" might be misleading anyways. Normal people may assume it means less waste but generally it feels like it's silently drifted a little bit into really meaning the amount of money flowing into their pockets.
Hopefully the citizens that are against state offering incentives to local farmers learn something, local food production is a national security thing even if is more cheaper today to import same food and let the land unused.
"Look at the early Covid pandemic and the shortage of face masks and other protective equipment. Look at vaccine production and how countries that could manufacture the vaccine prioritized domestic distribution first."
I don't think those are very good examples. A large part of the PPE shortage problem was from not restocking the national stockpile after the 2009 swine flu pandemic, in part from a bi-partisan, multiple administrations by both parties capture of that program by Emergent BioSolutions.
Which then abjectly failed when it had to deliver cell culture grown vaccines in its Baltimore plant that was in reserve for pandemics (fortunately that didn't hurt so much because the Janssen and Oxford vaccines are ... subpar, and Protein Sciences approach which works for flu generally failed or were extremity late (Novovax and Sanofi Pasteur)). We had part of a system and failed to use it properly. On the other hand if we as in the US were sharp we'd have bought the equipment Honeywell ended up scrapping when they shut down mask making in France.
3M for example does make masks in countries like the US and even keeps an extra set of equipment to double production in case of emergencies like this. But of course just doubling normal production isn't enough, and they and other companies like some that got crushed after 2009-10 found it hard to compete against very cheap PPE from the PRC, and refused to risk their companies again after COVID started hitting.
For vaccine manufacturing it's a tall order to expect political systems to be ready for once in a century events. This wasn't so bad for us with COVID since we could tool up during the development and testing of vaccines although the Indian national government abjectly failed to do that, but there was always going to be issues here, especially in learning curve issues.
Also how do you prepare for the best vaccines being mostly completely new technology for mass manufacturing? Even for fill and finish BoNTech's vaccine has at least at some point temperature requirements way beyond normal medical freezing, the latter any of us could achieve with a frost free consumer freezer.
In general, though, you're right, but solutions free of their own corruption problems are very hard. Plus tariffs are regressive taxes.
5 When he opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature saying, “Come and see!” And behold, a black horse, and he who sat on it had a balance in his hand. 6 I heard a voice in the midst of the four living creatures saying, “A choenix of wheat for a denarius, and three choenix of barley for a denarius! Don’t damage the oil and the wine!”
So uhm why is the barley so much cheaper? Actually.. the more I look into this, the more it doesn't sound like famine so much as a decline in food quality, where even wheat becomes a luxury good, and oil and wine are just unthinkable for anyone except the elite.
Those are definitely famine prices. A choenix [1] is about 1 quart (4 C), and a denarius was one day's wage for a laborer [2]. At, say $10/hr, a day's wage is $80. A 5 lb bag of flour has 18 C [3], so that would be $360 for a normal bag of flour! Barley is better, at only $120 for a 5 lb bag. When I've baked bread, about 8 C of flour produces 3 loaves, so a loaf of (manually produced) bread would be about $50!
The text is presumably describing a famine produced by drought, which were regular occurrences in the ancient world, rather than by siege. In the latter, the price of all food rises because the supply is dwindling. But a famine in the highly-connected ancient Mediterranean world would not necessarily affect other areas. Egypt supplied a lot of grain to the empire, so a drought in Egypt would affect grain prices empire-wide. But a drought in Egypt would not necessarily affect olive oil production in, say, Italy.
Regarding Revelation, though, each generation thinks the end times is their generation. One (potential) wheat shortage is hardly enough to qualify as meeting the prophecies... Besides, if we're just going to quote Bible passages, "there will be wars and rumors of wars, but the end is yet to come" (Matthew 24:6) [4] Besides, the only one of the 4 major interpretations of Revelation that actually makes sense of the entire text is that most of the end-time prophecies are about the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, which is called preterism (and also partial-preterism). While this does not preclude multiple fulfillments of a prophecy, OP presented no evidence for why the prophecy this out-of-context verse applies to the present situation.
That's what "let them eat cake" means, it's a very confusing expression which means the opposite of what it means, which Marie-Antoinette Bourbon (I think that's her name) said and which got her lynched on the spot.
Since then it means they're replacing an argument about scarcity with an argument about economic subordination, ie get into debt to buy cake if you're out of bread so you can buy cake at 1000x the cost, do whatever we say to not die. Become Marie Antoinette Bourbon's slave.
A modern form of that is American medicine, that's cake. They tell Americans they're getting the best medical care in the world, so it's OK it's the most expensive. In fact it's the opposite, it's the most inferior because it's the most expensive, the less you pay the better the results, with Cuba achieving the absolute best results linked directly to the absolute lowest prices. Like religion, the less money you have the more devout you can be, prayer and fasting.
Correction, she wasn't lynched. She was sent to the guillotine on 14th October 1793 for high treason. Her husband, King Louis XVI, the last king of the regime ancient had already been guillotined months earlier in January.
Gregorian. France adopted it in 1582, and the French Revolutionary calendar hasn’t reached the year 1793 yet (and has no month of October, in any case), so it’s not even a possibility for that date.
This is why India need Farm and Agricultural reforms. India can produce far more wheat (both for domestic usage and export) if they industrialize their agriculture.
Which reforms?
India already produces a lot of Wheat, and the Gov was sure about it's ability to feed India as well as the World. Hence a month ago, it declared it was ready to export and feed the World.
The lesson here is not about Agricultural reforms, but about Government reforms. It's ability to collect and analyze the data properly.
But primarily, its also about the need to address the increase in heat due to Climate Change. That's what lead to lower production this year, which the Gov did not factor in into their calculations.
To begin with, getting rid of land ceiling laws which results in farmer suicides (but that’s not the reason why it should be removed, they should be removed because they make agriculture very inefficient by putting an artificial limit on how much land a farmer can own).
Infosys can own 5000 acres of land for a golf course but they cannot own 5000 acres of agricultural land.
"Last week, Indian PM Narendra Modi told US President Joe Biden that India was ready to ship food to the rest of the world following supply shocks and rising prices due to the war in Ukraine." [1] (Article published on 19th April)
India has stopped exports before in response to domestic need. Onions in recent years[1], and also COVID vaccines in response to its devastating 2021 second wave, after it spent 2020 doing rounds of “vaccine diplomacy” where it assured countries it could help with their COVID vaccine needs. India is usually the world’s largest vaccine exporter, but its 2021 2nd wave led to this policy being put on hold as once again, exports were blocked[2].
Actions like these are not new or surprising because India’s economy is quite price sensitive and the government in response likes to micro-manage in the face of rising prices, but it does mean you’ve to take these sound bites to foreign leaders with a grain of salt. Very often these are actually intended for people at home to push the message of “see how much good we’re doing in the world?”
None of this is intended to be disparaging or specific to India, a lot of this applies to other countries as well.
Another factor of the Indian national government's failure with COVID vaccines was simply not sending any significant amounts of money to the companies that were either manufacturing them under contract like the Serum Institute of India (SII, largest in the world by doses, 1.5 billion/year in 2020). After that second wave, as far as I know the first really big wave hit, the CEO of the SII had to flee the country because of threatening demands he was getting from various powerful figures in various part of the country.
Although the SII also suffered from supply chain issues like everyone else, such as a world wide shortage of 2,000 L sterile plastic bags in which to culture cells and probably bacteria like the E. Coli used in the first step of making the mRNA vaccines.
Except US decided to influence a regime change in its rival Pakistan and install a puppet militarist. And to top that provide $12 billion aid through Saudi proxy and another 50+ millions direct aid.
US foreign policy has been baffling since last year.
I can’t find any news that supports this claim. Do you have a source? Closest is
> Khan’s new narrative is that there is a foreign conspiracy to oust him from power. And it is America, Khan says, that is really behind the no-confidence motion filed by opposition lawmakers.
https://theconversation.com/what-is-going-on-in-pakistan-and...
The United States can’t even get lawmakers in the unites states to cooperate. How are they getting an entire foreign legislature to cooperate?
It's because the political class in Pakistan is already a puppet in the hands of its Military. It's one of the few countries where the nuclear codes and strike decisions are in the hands of the military and not the civilian government. They control a puppet party which almost always gets a fixed number of seats from backward provinces. This party then becomes the king maker and hence controls who is at the helm of civilian government. The previous one (Imran Khan) also came into power with their support and so does the new one.
This isn't about foreign policy, this is about domestic food prices, which are more politically important than foreign policy for any government in any country
I don't see that being true in the US, it certainly hasn't changed policies that have resulted in massive increases of fertilizers, from high natural gas used for fixing nitrogen to the pre-invasion post-failed Color Revolution sanctions on Belarus which has 20% of the world's potash (potassium) market. We're both suppressing natural gas production and increasing as fast as possible our ability to export it as LNG.
Making Diesel fuel massively more expensive prior to a very expensive transition to electrical trucks is also making pretty much every good more expensive, everything travels by Diesel powered trucks and/or trains. Biden and company have also decided theoretical so far punishment of Russia is more important than all of the above, for example the East Coast has halved its refinery capacity in the last decade and as of late was getting a lot of distillates from Russia.
I'm not convinced on this issue one way or the other but I fail to see how this is relevant? Are you suggesting it was a consideration in India government's wheat ban? Seems unlikely.
Before, it was cool to talk about efficiency and how backward it was for countries to try to protect domestic industries instead of just allow “free trade”.
However, the last few years have illustrated that if you don’t have domestic production of essentials, then you are going to be hurting. Look at the early Covid pandemic and the shortage of face masks and other protective equipment. Look at vaccine production and how countries that could manufacture the vaccine prioritized domestic distribution first. Look now at global food supply and how countries as limiting exports of their grains.
The last decade or so is a story about countries and companies pursuing “efficiency” at the expense of increased fragility. Going forward, I think you will see more companies taking a larger role to make sure critical production capabilities stay domestic.