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Comment by briantakita | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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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