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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

>Agriculture competes with urbanization and it will always lose, as it should, because it's not an inherently superior or moral use of land

Easy for you to say when you have a full stomach. See what happened in countries that disregard their farmers or agricultural sectors. Food price soared, and social unrest set in leading to crime, anarchy and governments collapsing.

People need to eat, simple. Hungry people will eventually turn to crime to survive, including the people paid form your taxes to protect you (police, military, etc)

Being agriculturally self sufficient is essential for any country.

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The Netherlands is tiny and the 2nd largest agricultural exporter in the world by value, after the US. After the hunger winter in 1944 we became obsessed with food production but there is such a thing as too much.

The “export” argument is so stupid when you see how far it is exported. On a US scale this mostly would be within state borders.

It's not stupid, they're literally exporting it. And I have to add, it's a whole new level of Americentrism that I have never seen before to define the word "export" in terms of the distances between US states.

It is stupid, because it just makes sense to have agriculture in a fertile area like the river delta in NL. And it doesn’t make sense to focus on protecting the very species that are not able to flourish without human intervention.

So, focus on protecting species that do well in nitrogen poor areas in the areas that are actually nitrogen poor.

If we move production around to average everything out we’ll end up with a more homogeneous Europe, less production and less biodiversity.

You're turning things around. These species are suffering because of human nitrogen pollution. Where does all the excess nitrogen come from that is preventing these species from flourishing? Oh hey, turns out it's mostly agriculture.

Most species we want to protect now only thrived/peaked because people extracted nitrogen from the area, like in the case of heath fields and woodlands. Or became sand plains because we repeatedly burned down the forests for military reasons.

I don’t know if you know the history of your environment, but farmers do.

why? export within countries of the european union is comparable to export within states of the USA. i don't see the problem here.

>Being agriculturally self sufficient is essential for any country.

This is nothing to do with Netherlands’ own food self-sufficiency.

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