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I don't think COVID is a good benchmark. The whole matter was relatively minor, claiming lives of 0.09% of earth population (by WHO estimates). We can surely su
by alexey-salmin 1y ago
I don't think COVID is a good benchmark. The whole matter was relatively minor, claiming lives of 0.09% of earth population (by WHO estimates). We can surely survive "COVID for plants" with little damage but that's not at all the scenario I have in mind. I'll try to clarify on specific bullet points.
> I will risk a hypothesis that in "western" world we have enough canned and highly processed food (the one that lies on the shelf of your grocery store and has best before set 2-3 years ahead) to survive "covid but for crops" event.
The "western world" is definitely more prepared but if you want to rely on that during global and desperate famine you'll need to have the guts (and the heart) to machine gun hundreds of millions of refuges rushing into the western world to survive. Or nuke them before they depart.
> We waste massive amout of food on a daily basis. We have a huge variety of food available, and not everything has to be affected.
Absolutely all the food we have is based on the ability of plants to absorb sunlight. Exception would be an electric light greenhouse powered by the nuclear plant. Or by the coal/oil (that's some sunlight we can actually store). Take away the sunlight and the whole food variety goes down with it.
> And after the initial shock we got back to seamingly normal life.
Try to imagine a desperate famine: your kids have nothing to eat and will die in a matter of weeks unless you do something. There's no reason to believe the situation will improve. In such times killing your neighbor who has some food left keep your kids alive a bit longer is not an unusual decision. Someone has to die anyway, that is so.
Now imagine that at a global scale, famine is everywhere.