6 ms·

Many farmers are subsidised specifically so that food is over-produced in most years, specifically to ensure than in bad years people don't go hungry. Corporat

by ben_w 2mo ago

Many farmers are subsidised specifically so that food is over-produced in most years, specifically to ensure than in bad years people don't go hungry. Corporations may indeed be taking advantage of this, demanding prices so low that the farmers don't get the benefit of those subsidies. However: > buy the stuff and sell it at a premium later Is the point of a futures market. Futures let people trade a thing before they even know how supply and demand will balance, guaranteeing a price for the producer and letting them plan purchases of machinery and maintenance, with the risks (in bad years) and profit margins (in good years) going up the supply chain.

deepsun 2mo ago
Another reason why most countries subsidise their agriculture is because in times of war you don't want your enemy to starve you. That's mostly about high calories foods, not fancy salads though.
- epolanski 2mo ago
  It would be just easier to not wage war by the way. Can't think of many countries besides Canada and US that would not starve in NATO if such a necessity arose, and that's because they produce lots of cereals. All the other countries in NATO are major food importers.
  - RandomLensman 2mo ago
    Being a major importers of olive oil is probably not such a big deal. The EU is pretty self-sufficient for food, for example - can change a bit the food and agg mix if needed (and some countries have emergency stores as well).
  - tonyedgecombe 2mo ago
    >All the other countries in NATO are major food importers. All apart from France, Netherlands, Spain, Denmark, Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Turkey, Italy and Ireland. Interestingly the US is borderline now depending on how you measure food imports and exports.
    - messe 2mo ago
      Ireland isn't in NATO.
    - IMTDb 2mo ago
      The us could probably half it’s calories intake and be fine, if not better, from a public health perspective. The average ribeye steak you serve in your barbecue joint can feed a family of 4 in war time.
      - gentooflux 2mo ago
        Barbecue joints don't usually serve steaks. Tri tip, maybe, but if you're talking barbecue and beef then it's brisket.
    - epolanski 2mo ago
      I'm Italian and I don't think you're right. Italy is not food self-sufficient, it relies heavily on imports of cereals, animal feed, oils, and other. We add value up the chain (with hams, cheese, etc), but bar fruits and vegetables where we are okay-ish, we cannot feed ourselves. Its been decades that even our own pasta is made out of canadian and us cereals. We simply don't have enough, let alone we don't have good quality cereals. On top of that, our production is super reliant on imported fertilizers and chemicals. We would borderline starve in case of isolation.
  - IMTDb 2mo ago
    > It would be just easier to not wage war by the way Yeah, those pesky Ukrainians waging war for the pleasure of it.
    - epolanski 2mo ago
      Yes, Russia, NATO countries and its allies (Israel), are the major causes for conflicts in the last decades. But stop framing it as "defense", we've been almost exclusively the ones attacking, not defending. It's us being the bad guys.
  - ben_w 2mo ago
    > It would be just easier to not wage war by the way. Wars do not start by mutual agreement of all belligerents. If anything, usually the opposite.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - deepsun 2mo ago
    And the best way to ensure that no one attacks you it is to make strong army and economy.
mapt 2mo ago
In the US, we have a massive grainfed meat livestock sector that in an emergency could basically all be slaughtered in favor of feeding the grain to people. But we also have recent history demonstrating that this will not be allowed to happen, no matter how much starvation there is in poorer countries, we WILL have our steaks. Not negotiable.
- 8note 2mo ago
  rich americans will have their steaks. poor americans will starve outside the walls
  - cvwright 2mo ago
    I come from a lower class US background. I assure you, take one look at us and you’ll instantly see that very few of us are in any danger of starving.
    - ben_w 2mo ago
      While this is absolutely the case today, and obviously so, history has shown governments are quite capable of starving their people, they have managed this even by mismanagement while those regions still exported food.
- ben_w 2mo ago
  > But we also have recent history demonstrating that this will not be allowed to happen, no matter how much starvation there is in poorer countries, we WILL have our steaks. Not negotiable. Indeed, though given Trump's behaviour I have wondered what will happen when it's poorer *US states*. Fortunately, the farmers had a word and seem to have stopped the deportation of the undocumented (illegal) immigrants who do so much farm work. Also fortunately, the reservoirs (that weren't even connected to where the fires in SoCal were) were not actually emptied, so my worst-case scenario at the time didn't come up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_water_release_from_Lake_Kaweah_and_Lake_Success https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_water_release_from_Lake_K... Long may it continue that people who can say no to bad decisions, remain able to say no. Last thing anyone in the world needs with the Eurasian breadbaskets of Ukraine and Russia destroying each other's grain export capacity is the US shooting itself in both legs with an M134.
WillAdams 2mo ago
No, the point of a futures market is to have a reliable supply which matches demand and allows everyone who works to produce and use a given commodity to have a reasonable expectation of demand and how production should be matched to it. Goldman-Sachs should _not_ be inserting themselves into profiting on the poor's daily bread. https://theecologist.org/2011/sep/13/how-goldman-sachs-started-food-speculation-frenzy https://theecologist.org/2011/sep/13/how-goldman-sachs-start...
- ben_w 2mo ago
  A "reliable supply" is fundamentally not possible with all the vagaries of the natural world. Even the Code of Hammurabi makes reference to this*, and we still have "acts of god" in modern parlance. Futures significantly pre-date your link. * https://ehammurabi.org/law/48 https://ehammurabi.org/law/48
  - bix6 2mo ago
    How come acts of god only seem to ever benefit insurance corporations and never individual humans?
    - landl0rd 2mo ago
      Because tail-risk events are very unlikely, and the average person does not have enough money to diversify widely enough to smooth out their effects. Big entities can launder high variance into low, and they can afford to do this by taking many more positions than an individual. Second, insurance companies directly cannot hold as much risk as they once did. Just like banks don't hold loan books like they once did, insurance tends to reinsure heavily and much of the risk now bottoms out with cat bonds. Third, this is the entire reason we created insurance. It's like asking "why does blue look blue", or when people ask "why does poop happen to smell bad to us". It's tautological. If what you're upset about is claim denials those are occasionally illegitimate because insurance, like literally everything else, has the occasional bad actor. There's also a massive industry of attorneys who will work on contingency and provide legal representation to resolve that. Much more commonly, it's someone who didn't read his policy, or did but decided post-hoc what it "should" cover. He "shouldn't" have to bear the cost despite not taking out a more comprehensive policy beforehand. This isn't a "capitalism" problem; single-payer systems, generally agreed to be socialistic in nature, still don't cover some things and generally require coverage specifically to avoid people deciding they "deserve" coverage after they get sick. The other major category is things like business insurance in 2020; most policies wrote out plague after the SARS outbreak in the aughts. This isn't "insurers are evil" so much as bio risk is massively correlated which breaks a lot of things about underwriting. Lots of "acts of god" are, in fact, covered and pay out all the time. Hail and wind and such. Things like flood aren't, because a relatively small number of people live in floodplains and they tend to not want to bear the entire risk. People who live outside of floodplains, on the other hand, don't buy flood insurance, because they don't need it. So you have a lot of adverse selection that makes it hard to insure.
pseudohadamard 2mo ago
> Many farmers are subsidised specifically so that food is over-produced in most years, specifically to ensure than in bad years people don't go hungry. Which country does that? Here farmers were (very heavily) subsidised because footage of farmers walking off the land was political suicide for whichever party was in power at the time. When the subsidies were stopped by a government with a safe enough majority to be able to do it, many farmers did walk off the land. I've never heard of a government making sure there's over-production for future lean years.

by ben_w 2mo ago

deepsun 2mo ago

Another reason why most countries subsidise their agriculture is because in times of war you don't want your enemy to starve you. That's mostly about high calories foods, not fancy salads though.

epolanski 2mo ago
It would be just easier to not wage war by the way. Can't think of many countries besides Canada and US that would not starve in NATO if such a necessity arose, and that's because they produce lots of cereals. All the other countries in NATO are major food importers.
- RandomLensman 2mo ago
  Being a major importers of olive oil is probably not such a big deal. The EU is pretty self-sufficient for food, for example - can change a bit the food and agg mix if needed (and some countries have emergency stores as well).
- tonyedgecombe 2mo ago
  >All the other countries in NATO are major food importers. All apart from France, Netherlands, Spain, Denmark, Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Turkey, Italy and Ireland. Interestingly the US is borderline now depending on how you measure food imports and exports.
  - messe 2mo ago
    Ireland isn't in NATO.
  - IMTDb 2mo ago
    The us could probably half it’s calories intake and be fine, if not better, from a public health perspective. The average ribeye steak you serve in your barbecue joint can feed a family of 4 in war time.
    - gentooflux 2mo ago
      Barbecue joints don't usually serve steaks. Tri tip, maybe, but if you're talking barbecue and beef then it's brisket.
  - epolanski 2mo ago
    I'm Italian and I don't think you're right. Italy is not food self-sufficient, it relies heavily on imports of cereals, animal feed, oils, and other. We add value up the chain (with hams, cheese, etc), but bar fruits and vegetables where we are okay-ish, we cannot feed ourselves. Its been decades that even our own pasta is made out of canadian and us cereals. We simply don't have enough, let alone we don't have good quality cereals. On top of that, our production is super reliant on imported fertilizers and chemicals. We would borderline starve in case of isolation.
- IMTDb 2mo ago
  > It would be just easier to not wage war by the way Yeah, those pesky Ukrainians waging war for the pleasure of it.
  - epolanski 2mo ago
    Yes, Russia, NATO countries and its allies (Israel), are the major causes for conflicts in the last decades. But stop framing it as "defense", we've been almost exclusively the ones attacking, not defending. It's us being the bad guys.
- ben_w 2mo ago
  > It would be just easier to not wage war by the way. Wars do not start by mutual agreement of all belligerents. If anything, usually the opposite.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- deepsun 2mo ago
  And the best way to ensure that no one attacks you it is to make strong army and economy.

mapt 2mo ago

In the US, we have a massive grainfed meat livestock sector that in an emergency could basically all be slaughtered in favor of feeding the grain to people. But we also have recent history demonstrating that this will not be allowed to happen, no matter how much starvation there is in poorer countries, we WILL have our steaks. Not negotiable.

8note 2mo ago
rich americans will have their steaks. poor americans will starve outside the walls
- cvwright 2mo ago
  I come from a lower class US background. I assure you, take one look at us and you’ll instantly see that very few of us are in any danger of starving.
  - ben_w 2mo ago
    While this is absolutely the case today, and obviously so, history has shown governments are quite capable of starving their people, they have managed this even by mismanagement while those regions still exported food.
ben_w 2mo ago
> But we also have recent history demonstrating that this will not be allowed to happen, no matter how much starvation there is in poorer countries, we WILL have our steaks. Not negotiable. Indeed, though given Trump's behaviour I have wondered what will happen when it's poorer *US states*. Fortunately, the farmers had a word and seem to have stopped the deportation of the undocumented (illegal) immigrants who do so much farm work. Also fortunately, the reservoirs (that weren't even connected to where the fires in SoCal were) were not actually emptied, so my worst-case scenario at the time didn't come up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_water_release_from_Lake_Kaweah_and_Lake_Success https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_water_release_from_Lake_K... Long may it continue that people who can say no to bad decisions, remain able to say no. Last thing anyone in the world needs with the Eurasian breadbaskets of Ukraine and Russia destroying each other's grain export capacity is the US shooting itself in both legs with an M134.

WillAdams 2mo ago

No, the point of a futures market is to have a reliable supply which matches demand and allows everyone who works to produce and use a given commodity to have a reasonable expectation of demand and how production should be matched to it. Goldman-Sachs should _not_ be inserting themselves into profiting on the poor's daily bread. https://theecologist.org/2011/sep/13/how-goldman-sachs-started-food-speculation-frenzy https://theecologist.org/2011/sep/13/how-goldman-sachs-start...

ben_w 2mo ago
A "reliable supply" is fundamentally not possible with all the vagaries of the natural world. Even the Code of Hammurabi makes reference to this*, and we still have "acts of god" in modern parlance. Futures significantly pre-date your link. * https://ehammurabi.org/law/48 https://ehammurabi.org/law/48
- bix6 2mo ago
  How come acts of god only seem to ever benefit insurance corporations and never individual humans?
  - landl0rd 2mo ago
    Because tail-risk events are very unlikely, and the average person does not have enough money to diversify widely enough to smooth out their effects. Big entities can launder high variance into low, and they can afford to do this by taking many more positions than an individual. Second, insurance companies directly cannot hold as much risk as they once did. Just like banks don't hold loan books like they once did, insurance tends to reinsure heavily and much of the risk now bottoms out with cat bonds. Third, this is the entire reason we created insurance. It's like asking "why does blue look blue", or when people ask "why does poop happen to smell bad to us". It's tautological. If what you're upset about is claim denials those are occasionally illegitimate because insurance, like literally everything else, has the occasional bad actor. There's also a massive industry of attorneys who will work on contingency and provide legal representation to resolve that. Much more commonly, it's someone who didn't read his policy, or did but decided post-hoc what it "should" cover. He "shouldn't" have to bear the cost despite not taking out a more comprehensive policy beforehand. This isn't a "capitalism" problem; single-payer systems, generally agreed to be socialistic in nature, still don't cover some things and generally require coverage specifically to avoid people deciding they "deserve" coverage after they get sick. The other major category is things like business insurance in 2020; most policies wrote out plague after the SARS outbreak in the aughts. This isn't "insurers are evil" so much as bio risk is massively correlated which breaks a lot of things about underwriting. Lots of "acts of god" are, in fact, covered and pay out all the time. Hail and wind and such. Things like flood aren't, because a relatively small number of people live in floodplains and they tend to not want to bear the entire risk. People who live outside of floodplains, on the other hand, don't buy flood insurance, because they don't need it. So you have a lot of adverse selection that makes it hard to insure.

pseudohadamard 2mo ago

> Many farmers are subsidised specifically so that food is over-produced in most years, specifically to ensure than in bad years people don't go hungry. Which country does that? Here farmers were (very heavily) subsidised because footage of farmers walking off the land was political suicide for whichever party was in power at the time. When the subsidies were stopped by a government with a safe enough majority to be able to do it, many farmers did walk off the land. I've never heard of a government making sure there's over-production for future lean years.