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Comment by coliveira | Hacker News Reader

Producing our own food is not exciting either, but would you like to live in a place that produces no food and has to import 100% of what is needed to survive? This is the same thing here. Manufacturing is not a sexy activity anymore, but it is necessary, as long as we still live in a physical (non-virtual) world.

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> a place that produces no food and has to import 100% of what is needed to survive

like, say, New York City? Sure!

No, the rooftop garden on the Park Slope Whole Foods does not count.

Ny is not in a position where the people whom feed it could use it as a leverage in diplomatic relationships

'Who feed it', not 'whom'. The latter is the objective case of the pronoun, parallel to e.g. "them"; just as we wouldn't say "them feed it", we wouldn't say "whom feed it", either.

NYC was actually very pro confederacy at the very beginning of the civil war because they were so economically dependent on the south.

He's obviously talking about doing so on an international level. As long as the US is around, New York will never have to question whether or not the other states will be willing to do business with it.

While its highly unlikely, its slightly more believable that in the event of another world war or some kind of global food epidemic, a country that doesn't produce its own food might be completely screwed.

NYC is part of a larger constituent unit. Japan, for example not being part of a larger state, goes to great pains to subsidize its inefficient agriculture in order that they not rely entirely on trade for their foodstuffs. It's not that they think being dependent _right now_ is an issue. The issue is what state would they be putting themselves in were large producers to put an embargo on them (or there be plagues elsewhere affecting production and thus the little which gets produced by other countries gets reserved for those countries's local consumption).

Such dependencies were the British Empire's key vulnerability during WWI and WWII. They are a part of the reason why the British had to mortgage their empire to the US to pay for those wars.

Singapore?

Even more than food, Singapore is acutely conscious of its water dependency on Malaysia and goes to great lengths to limit this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEWater

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Reservoir

I believe most countries import massive amounts of food, including the U.S. It's much more efficient: Let those who can produce the food most efficiently do that, and you produce whatever you do most efficiently, then you trade. It's called 'comparative advantage' in economics.

Trade is necessary for the wealth of modern economies. Self-sufficiency is North Korea's approach.

The US has been a net exported of food for a long time. The gap changes, but as far back as I looked, we've never been a net importer. The whole "amber waves of grain" thing.

The US is most definitely a net food exporter and it has been that way for a long time. "U.S. agricultural exports have been larger than U.S. agricultural imports since 1960, generating a surplus in U.S. agricultural trade." https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/international-markets-trade/...

That doesn't contradict what I said: The U.S. imports large amounts of food. The charts on a related page show tens of billions of dollars of imports per year:

https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/international-markets-trade/...

Net imports is a different question.

It still means that the US could probably rely on domestic production if it was forced to do so. In a war, no other country could leverage their position by threatening to stop food exports to the US. It would surely result in less choice, but wouldn't really hurt the US.

> wouldn't really hurt the US.

My expectation is that it would far more expensive, raising food prices and doing significant harm to the economy. Also imagine the massive costs of shifting production and the gap in food availability during the shift. But I agree that the U.S. wouldn't starve.

I'm not sure about that... a large part of subsidies is to compete in foreign markets. A LOT of food is produced in the U.S. and the majority of trade is so we can get the likes of strawberries year round. A lot of the food staples like grains, beans, nuts, cereals, etc are domestic. Even a lot of the soy and corn. That doesn't mention that we do supply our own meat the vast majority of the time.

I think what would harm us more in total isolation would be the lack of more scarce resources (those used in electronics, batteries etc). We have a lot of materials here, but there are others where China and Africa trade are needed.

I understand the speculation, but if one learns about how economics, trade and the U.S. economy (and all other economies) really work, these hypotheses are clearly wrong.

His point wasn't that we don't import. It's that if we were to somehow have everyone say "we aren't selling food to the US", we wouldn't be totally screwed.

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