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Comment by Isamu | Hacker News Reader

Each of these predict food production will decline starting soon, although the optimistic ones forecast a recovery in production. Any idea why the imminent decline in food production in all cases?

It’s as though they are expecting global food producers to be caught off guard, as if they haven’t been planning against disaster since… forever.

[edit] Food production seems to be a function that is negatively affected by “pollution” but seems to be positively affected by industrial output. The dip in food production is mostly dependent on the shape of the pollution curve.

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> It’s as though they are expecting global food producers to be caught off guard, as if they haven’t been planning against disaster since… forever.

My belief in disaster preparedness from the powers that be was severely shaken by the early to mid term response to covid in the US.

I genuinely thought we’d handle a large scale disaster that had been prepared for forever much, much better than we did.

I think it was heavily dependent on the administration.

To my knowledge, recent past administration quite literally made a step by step "playbook on how to manage a pandemic" and the current administration quite literally completely ignored it, or something close to this.

Not sure why you are getting downvoted because you are telling the truth. Here are some links for reference: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/6819268/Pandemic-Play...

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/obama-team-left-pandemic...

https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-ap-top-news-virus-ou...

The unit was disbanded. Agree or disagree why it was disbanded, nothing was created to replace it. This is one of many examples of how things were/are worse than they needed to be.

I have a hard time coming up with examples of countries that handled the pandemic very well, so I would think that it's less dependent on the administration than it might appear.

I think like, Vietnam and South Korea did exceptionally well?

Think Vietnam eventually started getting hit though because of other countries lack of handling things, tourism, and the general fact that they're not by any means a rich country. So, they did surprisingly well given what they had, but eventually got dragged down by the rest of the bullshitters.

This is all off the top of my head in remembering things though, may be incorrect.

To the best of my knowledge Belorussia did absolutely nothing and didn't have a massive death wave.

And before you tell me it's a dictatorship so they have hidden the true numbers, I'm pretty sure if it had been the case it would have been at the forefront of the protests last year.

I know it's an unpopular opinion, but I do think COVID fear has been massively overblown.

Running an authoritarian regime in a former Soviet satellite is a decent way to ensure you don't get too many international travelers. That would be my guess for why they might have dodged the brunt of the pandemic.

Massive drought and flooding on scales that overwhelm any level of prior preparedness can mess up your food supplies pretty quick I reckon. We are starting to see these become more common with recent shifts in weather patterns.

https://mobile.twitter.com/JimBair62221006/status/1354175511...

Weather. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27810895

I have heard soils have become depleted of nutrients and ammonium fertilizers are not enough. There’s also the possibility of drought and loss of pollinators.

Yeah... I think it's pretty hard to believe a model from the 70's could predict the change on any of those with any accuracy, even less that it can predict the timing. I don't think we could do it now.

> soils have become depleted of nutrients and ammonium fertilizers are not enough

It's eye-opening to realize that soil can make its own nutrients and fertilizer (unlike the common view of soil as an inert "sponge" which needs all the fertilizer added to it). Bacteria breaks down rock into minerals (including the all-important potassium and phosphorus) and also fix nitrogen. The problem is that applying synthetic fertilizers kills off this soil biology, making the farmer dependent on.... more synthetic fertilizers. It's a nice racket, until it kills the planet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag

It's a huge biotech opportunity. Manufacture fertilizer biologically in-situ, vs blowing up some land, dissolving it in acid (along with tasty cadmium impurities[1]), and shipping it around the globe.

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00747683

The soil itself is depleted. This leads to a positive feedback cycle, and a hockey stick growth in the amount of industrial agriculture inputs required to keep a constant yield, right up to the point the farmer goes broke.

Then someone like Gabe Brown comes along, and uses regenerative farming, capturing about a ton of carbon/year as he builds new soil, and frees up the nutrients in the ground to be available to crops. It's a positive feedback cycle that makes the farm profitable again.

It's by no means a simple system, but it is profitable, so there is long term hope.

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