Hacker News Reader

Comment by m_stone_code | Hacker News Reader

Living in the UK, yes food prices are rising. But I work for an NGO whose main focus is in East Africa and I've been tracking food inflation there and seeing 200-400% jumps over the past three years.

Perfect storm of the lack of available fertilizer, wheat shortage and poor growing seasons over the past five years is hitting everyone. I don't see it geetting better until the world adjusts; swapping to alternative crops and producing nitrogen fertilizer at country level.

View on HN

Funny that you mention nitrogen fertilizer, here in Belgium there is a minor agricultural crisis going on due to the ag sector needing to reduce nitrogen emissions.

Same in the Netherlands. Except I'm not so sure about the 'minor' part.

I would be funny if it wasn't horrifying. We're all shooting ourselves on the foot while other countries can only dream of achieving the industrial, technological and economical progress we've made. Deindustrialization 30,40,50 years ago was a side effect. But destroying our own energy infrastructure, industry, and now even agricultural sector? This is totally mad, and despite turning a blind eye this will come back to bites us, hopefully sooner rather than later so we can still undo some of the damage within 20 years.

Which one is "shooting ourselves in the foot"? Pumping more nitrogen fertilizer in the environment or cutting it?

I think it depends who is "we" and what's the timeline for shooting ourselves in the foot, short term or long term.

In both cases it sucks. I have a preference for the better long term strategy, at least I don't have the impression or driving into a wall (or I feel like we trying to swerve/break).

Some day it's hard not to feel overwhelmed, looking at the global prospective. Keeping our planet habitable will require us to: * Sacrifice individual benefit for the common good * Trust each other * Think long term (like multiple generations)

All things humanity has a horrible track record at.

That does not put me in an optimistic mood.

On the up side, if we kill everything including ourselves maybe in millions of years the next intelligent race will find remnants of our apocalypse and learn from it? =)

Pumping nitrogen into the ground produces food. As for the long or short term question, we're amputating our foot because we predict that a minor cut will be infected. Knowing what you don't know is the key here. Right now no one can predict how the world will look like in 5 years. War, disease, new weapons, new disruptive technologies being developed. Whatever the temperature and sea level change will be, it'll be the least of my concerns for a good few decades.

Are you saying “no one can predict what effect nitrogen will have on our environment long term”? Because there is a broad consensus on the impact I believe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_pollution#Nitroge...

Or are you saying “maybe there will be a cheap technology to clean up the environment in the future”? Which seems to be a very risky bet.

I’m not saying I have a simple solution, we do need crops, lots of them, there’s no question. But nitrogen pollution can’t be simply dismissed, we need to find a solution halfway: reduce nitrogen pollution but keep sufficient crop yields.

The ag sector only needs to because they are being forced to by people who have no idea what it takes to run a farm.

The core problem is too much nitrogen absolutely destroying the native plants in Natura 2000 areas that always had very low nitrogen levels. You can be the most knowledgeable farmer in the world but that won't change the fact that intensive nitrogen (ammonia) emissions will annihilate the native plants in these protected areas, let alone outside them.

I agree, the problem is fairly global. So UK specific explanations are unlikely to have much validity. Some punters myopically only considering UK features (such as brexit) is misleading.

https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/food-inflation (Click on World Tab, and click on the inflation heading to sort - I needed to tap and slide to get it to sort descending).

Inflation (in general, not food inflation specifically) in the UK is worse than in, say, Germany and France. The reasons for that are specific to the UK, and they do include Brexit. I think it's not myopic to point that out. We shouldn't give a free pass to people who have wreaked economic havoc to the UK just because there are some geopolitical factors that happen to wreak even worse havoc at the same time.

Absolutely not. But Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Czechia, all have comparable or worse inflation. Brexit was and continues to be a shit show, but the UK isn't uniquely in trouble here.

Question isn’t how Brexit UK compares to other countries, question is how it compared to hypothetical UK without Brexit. The government is spending a lot of money keeping inflation down through the energy price cap.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com