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Comment by adwn | Hacker News Reader

> The agricultural system, for which pollinators play a key role, creates millions of jobs worldwide.

This sentence feels weird and misplaced. Compared with the agricultural system's main task – keeping us from starving to death – its role as a job provider seems utterly insignificant.

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Quite a lot of agricultural isn't to keep people from starving to death - think hemp, cotton, tea/coffee, sugar cane, natural rubber, chocolate, and coca in places it is legal. None of those things prevent people from starving at all.

A lot of agricultural foodstuff is terribly inefficient at meeting the goal of "keeping people from starving." We grow them though (and produce in the case of meat) because humans really enjoy them. If the main goal was to prevent starvation we wouldn't produce resource-intensive food products or we would produce them in moderation.

Agriculture's purpose is economic. Eating (and eating tasty food) does have a large demand though.

> Agriculture's purpose is economic. Eating (and eating tasty food) does have a large demand though.

I'm maybe just repeating what the parent comment said, but that seems backwards to me.

If we treat agriculture's purpose as economy for economy's sake, which we have been doing, it seems counter-productive to our goals of staying alive sustainably.

This really should be no surprise. Mainstream economics practices that the environment is a subset of the economy and not the other way around.

"Sure, I can live without fresh water and clean air, but a market? I need a market." /s

If you lack fresh water and clean air, there would be a market for fresh water and clean air. :-)

The US produces enough grain to feed the world -- as does Russia. Starvation is a function of government policy. See Somalia and the warlord-grain thefts in the early 1990s.

From http://data.worldbank.org/topic/agriculture-and-rural-develo... : For the 70 percent of the world's poor who live in rural areas, agriculture is the main source of income and employment.

It would make more sense to me to say:

"The purpose of the economy is to grow food sustainably."

Then it would it say:

"The purpose of sustainable agriculture is to support the economy"

The economy is a tool we use to manipulate our own behavior. The idea that it's a goal in and of itself is pretty confusing to me.

Jobs haven't been a motivator for the farm economy for a couple of centuries. In 200 years, we've gone from farms employing over 95% to farms employing less than 3% of the population. In the past 50 years alone, farming improvements have supported a global doubling of the population while simultaneously cutting food costs drastically for nearly everyone.

If ever there was a triumph of modern technology, it's been the past 200 years of farming.

The problem is that stupid businessman just can't seem to get it through their thick skulls that the environment might just be important. The only language they understand is money. Gonna be the death of us all. Idiots.

According to historian Dr. Joseph Tainter's book 'The Collapse of Complex Societies', if you exclude isolated groups such as tribes, there have been 23 distinct civilizations throughout the course of human history and 22 have failed. Hypercomplexity and specialization tend to be common characteristics, as well as, misuse of resources.

People ask for meat, businessmans provide agriculture for the animals and the animals, why is only the businessman responsible? most of the agricultural land is not used for direct human consumption, humans need to stop being ignorant and start to change their habits.

In this context, it's more a jobs thing, the basic foods which supply the calories which keep us from starving to death don't require pollinators, or at least bees. As I recall, going down the list, onions were the only one I'd really miss: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_crop_plants_pollinated...

Note also that in the US honeybees are an invasive/cultivated species brought over from Europe, their travails are akin to those of, say, the turkeys and chickens that have been suffering from/culled due to avian flu last year.

What? You don't think this is an issue because your McDonald's diet doesn't require fruits and vegetables? You need more than calories but also a thing called nutrients. That's your standard for a quality life? Well, I am not staving to death...

Without looking for veggies that don't need pollinators, in a pinch, sprout your grain, although that won't take care of your Vitamin C requirement. Better, as some POWs held by the Japanese in WWII did, use a bacteria or mold to convert the starch to sugar, then culture yeast in that. By the end of the war, they were healthier than their guards.

> Compared with the agricultural system's main task – keeping us from starving to death

the agricultural system's main task is to make money & control others through the market.

if it's main goal was to feed the world, we would have succeeded long ago. just look at all of the food thrown away (more than enough to feed those who don't have food) & subsidies to grow ethanol, instead of food.

the best agricultural model is one that encourages autonomy. that means the community is self-reliant to grow it's own food, instead of depending on another entity to supply food.

The problem isn't supply. We have more than enough supply as you said. The problem is transportation. There just isn't a technology that's cheap and light enough to make shipping food to the food poor countries around the world profitable. If there was somebody would be doing it. Instead they rely on charity and subsistence farming

That’s not really it. Poor countries have a mix of rich, middle class, and poor. Its poor people in poor countries that can’t afford to pay for food as their jobs are destroyed by importing food.

Most of the "we must destroy this food" stuff happens to control the pricing of food. If it's getting too cheap, they need to restrict supply so they start destroying otherwise good food.

This isn't as big an issue as it used to be in the bad old days of EU production subsidy. Most of the modern food waste is along the production and distribution chain, especially in stores when food has passed its use-by date.

Can you provide a citation? That's a strong claim, and I would like to read more about it.

Me too. And if that's true, why do we have to worry about the end of food because of bees?

Its common knowledge IMO, but you can certainly Google it. Agriculture is a near-perfect free market, so organizations and governments often destroy crops to raise prices.

How does government interference in a market make it near-perfectly free? The U.S. agriculture market is infamous as a source of government waste and pork barrel spending:

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21643191-crop-pr...

Sorry, perfectly competitive is the phrase I'm looking for.

I don't think that's correct either. Many of the crops grown in the american west wouldn't be profitable if it weren't for huge subsidies. In the most egregious cases Californian farmers have grown thirsty, low value crops while their counterparts in the Southeast were being paid to destroy them.

https://mises.org/library/water-subsidies-and-shortages-amer...

No, what we need is a decentralized food system. You really should be eating food indigenous to the region in which you live.

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