War-Fueled Global Hunger Catastrophe on the Way with Solutions Tough to Come By
forbes.com
forbes.com
What we lack is western governments that:
- Understand where fertilizer comes from, and how to create billions of tons of it from raw materials available in western Canada.
- Stops crushing small business and farmers, by forcing them to pay 10x to 100x more in total compliance, regulatory and taxation costs than the big businesses that lobby the government and create the compliance, regulatory and taxation laws
- Are forcibly stopped by their citizenry from abusing them for generations.
Unless you're high in the grievance hierarchy; then you can burn shit down, and get the Prime Minister to literally kneel before you.
Corrections to my post:
- 20% of world supply actually
- K, not Ka
For analogy -- what is so special about Klondike and gold, why can't a different place do it?
„Regulation“ and „compliance“ are the same, more or less. It’s just florist to keep repeating both.
Taxes rarely prevent some business from existing since almost all taxes are tied to profits, not revenues.
Do you have any examples of regulation in farming that make it so much harder for the 1,000,000 $ farm than one 10 x the size? And, if that is so, why aren’t these large companies making the gains in efficiency you are promising?
* Does one need capital for growth (more tractors, more people)? How do taxes affect the process of saving the capital, do they increase or decrease the pace?
* Having multiple ways to invest someone's capital, would a person prefer the enterprise with higher net profits?
People look at a state like Montana and think that the vast stretches of land are undeveloped, but in reality, unless you went in with a lot of investment and care, the soil would just lift off and you'd end up with another dust bowl.
If Canadian farmers are like farmers in most of the western world, they're great at filling forms, exploiting bureacracy, getting paid to not grow sugar beet or whatever the latest scheme is, then yakking about how it breaks their cowboy hearts that the state can't just let them be free.
Sure there would be crop losses to animals in such fields, but those animals also fertilize the soil and keep the microbiome diverse.
My general feeling is that a good field is usually the product of generations of work: where I grew up, you had to put drainage channels every two meters, giant ditches, endless effort to get rid of weeds, etc. It wasn't the case you could just move into unmaintained soil, especially virgin soil with shrub on it, and expect it to start producing wheat without a hell of a lot of labour.
That's compounded by the fact that farmers are basically soil-seeking missiles, and always have been. If there's a patch of really good farming land, that's probably been a lot of competition for it in the preceding centuries. If there aren't any farmers on it, there's almost always a reason.
Of course industry have made progress, nourishing cows with grains/cereals etc make them grow more, more quickly, taste better etc, irrigation make fields more productive just to stay basic, but most effective technique also pollute, especially those for agriculture than those for animal husbandry.
Yes, there is room to expand productions and ways to do so in less polluting manners, but there is a big issue in the middle: mass distribution is incompatible with a distributed farming model, witch means on one side some big&powerful bodies will fight against such move, and more practically that food prices will jump anyway and food variety will fall much since many long-distance imported products can't be imported at an acceptable cost without mass distribution.
In a way or another, even just for changing to a more sustainable system we face huger, and we the "westerns" face the little impact, populations of vast part of the world face far bigger disasters and very probably will not get them without reacting. Between them there are poor from central Asia that can't really do much but there are also big powers like China that desperately need food for an enormous population having a polluted and industrialized land + no fertile ground around to invade. They need to reach South America to find enough food, and South America is already a feud of USA who will not like having less big but still big food supply problems in the meantime South Americans do not like much nourish nor Chinese nor USA while starving... That means some kind of war, perhaps with proxies to avoid a full scale nuclear conflict, and actually war have side effects, one between them is crushing various productions, food included...
And what policies, exactly, have this impact on the food supply you are talking about? Because vaccinations and mask wearing doesn’t stop corn from growing, last I checked.
As in the "ham-fisted Covid response" was going to have a bunch of ill-effects. But now that there's a war, which is going to increase those effects, and would have created them anyway, said governments have a scapegoat: "It's not our measures that have created these problems, it's the war. We can't be blamed!".
There may not be enough seed to plant alternative crops, rather than corn meant for ethanol production. Presumably corn of the varieties used for ethanol could be used as human or animal food, but it might be necessary to expand infrastructure (eg, milling capacity) to allow this, which ought to be possible given the lead time before harvest, if people start thinking about it now.
It's also possible that more land could be planted with alternative crops (eg, wheat) using the available seed by somewhat reducing the amount of seed used per acre. The lower seed density would often be mostly compensated for by increased growth. (If typical seeding rates are optimized for yield, the derivative of yield with respect to seeding rate will be zero, so a small reduction in seeding rate will have only a slight effect on yield.) Slightly lower seeding rates might come about naturally if the price of seed goes up. It's also possible that grain currently destined for food use could still be diverted for use as seed - checking that out while it may still be true seems like it could be a priority.
Even if you take today's raised prices as permanent, what's the expected profit margin? Seems like bitcoin mines are a far safer investment.
"Where can I invest in that?" ... If you actually want it to happen, invest where you live and where you can participate.
(this was a huge deal and shocked people worldwide)
(I remember when Bhopal happened, and I am still shocked. I just read up on details last year. It is not over. People are still suffering and dying from it today.)
There is always a ready market for ammonia, and demand will only ever increase.
Bitcoin will be an investment so long as people actually want to buy them. The moment they don't, it won't be anymore.
Yes that might mean Putin starts jabbering about nukes, but if the west says from the outside that their waraims are limited to freeing Ukraine and ensuring its freedom, Putin isn't going to trade his nice life for nuclear war.
Also some thinkers like global hunger as a means to fuel big unrest and countless deaths both to artificially lower the actual human population, after having pushed it too reproduce for equal "business reasons", just to overturn the table to start other the same model again.
I'm just curious about two things: when (not if, reading the history a bit) a sufficient mass of population will comprehend who's it's real enemy and if the human life on Earth will survive... Of course, history say that certain kind of people always survive, as a cohort, but...