North Korean market prices suggest serious food shortages | Hacker News Reader

North Korean market prices suggest serious food shortages

38north.org

185 pointsEA-3167233 comments

The fact that countries like Venezuela struggle to feed their own people in the modern era, during the time of greatest abundance and production, while the bulk of the world figured out food production/trade a century ago really blows my mind. Not sure how people tolerate that sort of thing and still pretend the economic system is a good idea. Or hand wave it away that it's all some foreign conspiracy.

Iran is sanctioned, CIA works against them, etc too but they still managed to feed their people over the last decade plus (ignoring the recent global food crisis).

Edit: the Iran analogy might have been a poor choice, they recently enacted Venezuelan style price controls. Idk why governments think they can make things cheaper simply by just saying "this is now the new price and you can't change it".

> The Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran began direct payments in the form of cash subsidies to Iran's public instead, with the government deploying an electronic coupon system as a form of price control to prevent price gouging in place of the import subsidies.

> Despite Raisi promising that "prices on wheat, medicine, and petrol will not increase in any circumstances", the price of some food products rose by over 300%.

Price controls always amplify existing supply issues and are used as short-term Bandaids to mask more fundamental issues.

https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2019/01/iran-inflation-...

Food was weaponized a long time ago. Modern famines generally are not due to lack of resources or economic problems.

And North Korea did create a famine before too, where they asked the population to give everything they had to the government and said that they would take care of everything.

And then they sectioned off parts of the country and let them starve.

Kim didn't "ask" anything.

It's of course an order.

I would have agreed with you until last year. Now, thanks to the Ukraine war, we see massive price increases for food in egypt and the middle east. For a lot of people there, food became economically way more unavailable. The interesting part about this is that usually it's the war zones where the famine happens because it's virtually impossible to bring food there. But in this instance, the war was in the producer country.

Venezuela was gang-ridden. Their "economy" consisted of "you go outside to try to trade money for goods and services, some punk comes along and demands all your money and all their goods, you both go home empty-handed." Nobody was bothering to run businesses, because their productive output would all go toward — as economics would put it — "illegitimate rent-seekers."

No change in economic system would have made this better. They needed to get rid of the gangs. And they did. Things are getting better there now, though there's a delay, as people still need to start and ramp up the productive businesses that were infeasible under the gangs.

What did they do to control the gangs? Send out the Fist of the North Star?

The Venezulan gov simply co-opted the gangs and now uses them as hit squads, anti-protest 'police', surveillance/intelligence agents in local communities, etc.

Also whenever there are elections each member is required to go around the slums and force a bunch of people to vote for Maduro so he stays in power and keeps paying them $$.

> Every member of a colectivo is required to bring ten individuals to vote at polls during elections

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colectivo_(Venezuela)

They send Super Bigote

> Things are getting better there now

Do you have a source for this? Last I read about the situation (maybe a couple of months ago) Venezuela had the biggest inflation in the world.

Their economy consisted of bad oil, exported, and fracking made that a no-go.

They'd 'privatized' their farms so that meant, no domestic food production as the 'new' farmers had not the training, equipment nor funds to run a farm operation.

So food imports became unaffordable as oil exports dried up. Food riots and instability. Is that when the gangs came in? I imagine.

> They needed to get rid of the gangs. And they did.

Can you please provide a source? I tried to find one but was unsuccessful. From https://insightcrime.org/news/venezuelas-reliance-brutal-fut... :

> While there is substantial evidence of how these mega-operations have caused widespread abuses of the civilian population, it is unclear if they have been an effective security strategy.

"Price controls and the seizure of farms and factories by the government led to food shortages."

-NPR

You understand that before Hugo Chávez was in power, Venezuela was (1) middle-income and (2) relatively safe?

Maybe the gangs were a problem in 2022 but that was a consequence of economic collapse and the government relying on armed thugs for security, not the cause.

Venezuela might've been middle income in the late 70s and early 80s but it struggled in the 90s. Chávez rose to power in the wake of an economic crisis that kept getting worse throughout the 90s for Venezuela. He didn't come out of nowhere. Chávez screwed Venezuela over long-term, but per-capita GDP rose sharply in the aughts[1] (at least according to the World Bank).

The lesson here is you should generally optimize your economic policy for broad economic prosperity - concentrating economic benefits to specific population cliques (be they socialist or capitalist) is a breeding ground for instability, authoritarianism and economic turmoil.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/VEN/venezuela/gdp-per-...

El Salvador in the past year is locking up gang members. Supposedly it is working to reduce crime, though I haven't been there to see it.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-65596471

Are you perhaps confusing Venezuela with El Salvador?

I'm not sure they had food shortages before Chavez. He was famous for 'redistributing' farms that produced loads of food and giving them to a few impoverished locals who the produced close to no food for sale.

> trade

Let's not pretend that trade is freely open and available to Venezuela.

What's to pretend? Venezuela is free to trade with the majority of countries in the world. No one is blockading their ports.

That's simply false. We have prevented Venezuela from selling their number one export (oil) by threatening other countries from buying it. We routinely seize the property of countries who we unilaterally sanction (as opposed to internationally recognized sanctions stemming from the UN). Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Russia ect. People can argue whether these policies, sanctions and economic blockades are good, bad, useful or ethical, but there is no question that they exist.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trade-wto-usa-venezuela-i...

https://www.npr.org/2020/08/14/902532689/u-s-seizes-iranian-...

https://www.voanews.com/a/extremism-watch_us-firm-secures-oi...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/31/us/politics/russia-sancti...

Are you confusing Cuba and Venezuela?

No, he's not. We have sanctions on Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Syria and a host of other countries. When we unilaterally sanction a country, and punish not only that country, but third parties that do business with them, we give those sanctioned countries an excellent scapegoat for their problems.

https://ofac.treasury.gov/sanctions-programs-and-country-inf...

I wonder how well the US would function if it were under economic blockade by the entire hemisphere.

Pretty well because we produce a lot of food, some of which we don’t even bother eating.

Economic growth would slow down, but overall the US would function just fine as we are self sufficient in most economic inputs that really matter. We also have the military force to break any conceivable blockade and take what we need, so no one would be stupid enough to even try blockading us in the first place.

It's always been creepy to me that whenever the topic of US foreign policy brought about from the angle of "other nations should impose to the US the same geopolitical policies that it imposes over other nations" some US citizens are quick to talk like bullies threatening to retaliate with their military forces if any of those suggestions were to come to fruition.

However, when that same topic is kicked off with "the people of an enemy state are struggling" they act as if they were nothing but concerned, compassionate humanitarians. The wording of the message changes, but the intent does not. The desired result is still intervention without consequences.

I guess if you're a highly biased nationalist it's still in your interest to talk like you're an impartial rational person when discussing these topics. Of course you can't keep that mask on all the time.

It's simple the world is run by realpolitik not by good feelings and high minded ideals. The best you can hppe for is to ensure the safety of your country and people.

US citizens have no shortage of good feelings and high minded ideals when it comes to criticizing other countries, though. I guess what GP was pointing out is that this double standard is especially creepy when it comes to military matters.

I think a lot of people are just naive and simply don't understand that the good feelings and high minded ideals are kayfabe. The US is the country at the forefront on advertisement and propaganda, so this is not really something that should be surprising.

The kayfabe works very well too, so why would they stop.

Who are we currently blockading? We sanction, which means we don’t allow citizens to do business with certain other nations. But there are no ships in harbor or at sea preventing those nations from trading with their remaining partners.

I think the concept is an embargo on trade with the US like sanctions, not a physical blockade. If countries were refusing to do business with the US, the military couldn’t really help short of invading them or engaging in shipping piracy.

I’d think this is unlikely to ever happen since the US is a lucrative market to export to.

We have so much surplus food that we burn it in our gas tanks. We'll be OK.

And good luck with that blockade. Countries that don't waste decades enforcing known-defective economic systems are hard to defeat with tactics like that. They tend to have the necessary productive capacity to support a strong military.

I think it’s more the size of the USA and the abundance of its natural resources than its political system that makes it futile to blockade it.

Because a country needs lots of different resources and enough people to be self-sufficient at the current level of technology, I would think almost all smaller countries can be blockaded into the mid-twentieth, if not the nineteenth century, no matter what their political system, if the blockade is held up long enough.

I can’t see countries the size and population of Belgium or Peru making modern cars _and_ modern phones _and_ modern clothing _and_ modern farming tech _and_ plastic _and_ (etc) after an effective decades-long blockade, for example.

Authoritarian states almost never prosper, even if they have all the tools to do so. Everything built on lies and games of power will crumble under its own villainy.

China seems to be doing okay. So much so that every western government seems to be becoming more authoritarian.

China improved since the 1949 revolution by becoming gradually less authoritarian in matters of economic security. Even so, their GDP per capita is still a fraction of their neighbors (Taiwan, South Korea, Japan)

Singapore also uses authoritarian capitalism and out-GDP-per-capita's all of the above, including the US.

Maybe the size of a country is a bigger factor than all.

> including the US.

Just barely. Also you should be comparing it to a single city in the US.

That's the only developed dictatorship in the world though, nobody knows if it's possible to replicate that outside of a city state

Is that cause and effect defensible? I haven’t heard any Americans civilians or politicians claim overtly or subtly that the US should be more like China.

> Is that cause and effect defensible?

Probably not, it could be for other reasons but it’s certainly happening.

> I haven’t heard any Americans civilians or politicians claim overtly or subtly that the US should be more like China.

It depends what you mean by like China. Nobody’s advocating little red books but there’s plenty advocating for mass surveillance, control of speech, banning books or telling women what the can and can’t do with their bodies.

It's the natural process of politicians, they always want more and more control

OK for who? Not the 10s of millions murdered.

China "seems" to be doing okay, and they have succeeded in lifting hundreds of millions out of desperate poverty. But their GDP numbers are all lies because every level of the CCP hierarchy has been exaggerating on official reports for decades. There is no independent verification allowed. External estimates based on resource flows and satellite imagery present a much bleaker picture.

> Everything built on lies and games of power will crumble under its own villainy.

US seems to be doing fine.

US is doing fine despite its political and cultural issues, not because of them. We'll see how that turns out in 30 years.

That's what they said 30 years ago "in 20 years we'll see america crumble because of policies of $THE_OTHER_PARTY"

Or more pragmatically: whatever your motivation to become leader, you can only keep doing that if you stay leader. That means keeping the support of those with the power to dispose you. In authoritarian regimes that often means vast amounts of resources flow to military leadership, police, oligarchs, and anybody else who can effect regime change, their corruption it's tolerated, and everybody else gets what's left. If anything.

The genius of democracy is that regular citizens have the power to cause regime change, so leaders are well advised to care about their opinion too, in addition to all the other groups

In democracy, just create fights between groups on issues of no-substance, and have two political parties. You get a system, which appears to be democratic, but controlled by the elite (uber wealthy, CEO-class, elite schools, think tanks, elite class of politicians, elite intellectuals specialized in propaganda). Politicians/leaders/parties change every x years, based on the election schedule, but this is a better system for the elite.

Especially easy in election systems that turn into two-party systems on their own, like first-past-the-post.

> but this is a better system for the elite.

Empirically it’s better for everyone. So yes, you’re technically correct

Canada foodbanks have been struggling recently. USA has poverty. It isn't just Venezuela or North Korea.

Correct, but in America impoverished people are more likely to be obese than the general population. People experiencing food insecurity tend to consume calorie dense cheap food. This is not nearly the same as Venezuela or North Korea, which can't supply enough calories to feed their people.

American Farm subsidies to over produce > Lots of cheap food pretty much everywhere it even created the school lunch programs we have today > fed/overfed people. We even have billions of blocks of cheese in a cave system because of the dairy subsidies. I'm all for subsidies, except that the people that have farms couldn't survive without it and think they are doing it all on their own and voting regressive even though they likely wouldn't exist without the generations of subsidies their families took.

When it comes to food supply, abundance is more important than efficiency. Maximally efficient systems are fragile and fragility is precisely what you don't want when the failure mode is mass starvation.

Don't forget diversity as well. If we only eat potatos and some new fungus mutation wipes out the potato crop then you're fucked.

> The fact that countries like Venezuela struggle to feed their own people in the modern era, during the time of greatest abundance and production, while the bulk of the world figured out food production/trade a century ago really blows my mind

Ever noticed that somehow only US enemies have "food shortages" ?

You shouldn't believe everything you read.

Can you name a US ally with food shortages?

That's his point.

I didn’t really get his point. Is he implying that there is some global conspiracy to keep food shortages in countries allied to the US a secret?

US allies do not need to be afraid to be victims of criminal sanctions enacted by the country that controls the international currency.

Which sanctions are criminal? What law is being violated?

All sanctions are acts of war and all sanctions without UN approval are criminal. This would include basically all sanctions that the US has imposed over the last decade or more.

Sanctions seem to be the opposite of acts of war by basically any definition.

Sanctions kill. There are plenty of examples including this one. By any definition, sanctions are acts of war. See [1] for a good argument.

1. https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2022/06/29/economic-sanctions-as-...

I feel like the quotidian definition of war would be something like 'state induced violence to coerce results' and so, no, a policy that is specifically not violent and indeed is being done instead of violence would be definitely not-war. I suppose you can stretch the definition to include it. But if 'anything that kills people' is war, then like, not having universal Healthcare is war, as is understaffing emergency rooms... So that is clearly not a useful definition of war.

Sanctions are akin to siege warfare. You don't have to fire a shot, the threat is enough, and you starve the population until they can't handle their kids dying and they overthrow the leadership and surrender. That's literally what the desired outcome is with sanctions. It is absolutely violence and warfare by any definition.

> by basically any definition.

Clausewitz said that war is a continuation of state policy by other means; in this view neither is the 'opposite' of the other because in both cases it's a government pursuing some political object. I suppose the real 'opposite of war' would be the absence of state policy. Apathetic indifference to whatever the other party is doing.

> 24. WAR IS A MERE CONTINUATION OF POLICY BY OTHER MEANS.

> We see, therefore, that War is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means. All beyond this which is strictly peculiar to War relates merely to the peculiar nature of the means which it uses. That the tendencies and views of policy shall not be incompatible with these means, the Art of War in general and the Commander in each particular case may demand, and this claim is truly not a trifling one. But however powerfully this may react on political views in particular cases, still it must always be regarded as only a modification of them; for the political view is the object, War is the means, and the means must always include the object in our conception.

Obviously Clausewitz's assertions are controversial but I think it's a viewpoint worth mentioning since you invited a broad consideration of the matter.

The UN security council would never approve any sanctions in response to some countries launching unprovoked imperialist wars of aggressions.

Sow why even bring that up? UN could only “punish” small insignificant countries with no allies.

Explain why China is not helping these countries.

China's own reliance on food imports has soared because China is poorly run and lead. Continued destruction of their own arable land due to criminal mismanagement mean there is no end in sight to this trend; international trade is China's lifeline.

"In 2022, China's overall grain output reached 685 million tons, an increase of 3.7 million tons over 2021, which showed strong resilience despite the pandemic. "

You are implying that being an enemy of the US causes food shortages, rather than their own failed governmental policies.

That implication is pretty dubious. I'm sure sanctions (and whatever else the US does to its enemies) don't help. But the root of the problem is poor governance, which causes major problems, and often results in poor relations with the US due to humanitarian concerns.

The flaw in socialism/communism is that it requires huge amounts of government power, and that is always abused. There may be economic problems with socialism/communism too, but we never get to see it because the concentrated power causes a political meltdown too fast.

Humanitarian concerns is the reason for poor relations with the U.S? I find it hard to believe that people actually believe this, there is such a thing as history and the following is a very common pattern: new government decides that deals with U.S companies is unfair and wants to change things, then a coup is attempted if successful the new government bows to work closely with its allies. If it fails then suddenly all the newspapers/news networks decide to tell us about the suffering of these people under the brutal dictatorship. Then sanctions from everyone, then the people really start to suffer and it ends with a new coup and new bows to allies.

This has happened sooo many times already using the same played out playbook. I just assume every single coup now is the same. Why do you think Turkey suddenly switched sides after a failed coup?.

We know its happening, we benefit from it happening. Who knows maybe it is better this way for everyone in the long run. You can't split the world into good and bad and always try to align yourself with the good because it can only be done if you are willing to fool yourself.

> Why do you think Turkey suddenly switched sides after a failed coup?.

Switched sides to whom? What are you talking about?

Haiti

Don't worry, they're sending Haiti 53M in aid [to hire more cops].

https://www.usaid.gov/news-information/press-releases/jun-08...

India was not a US enemy but had food shortages during it socialist period.

It definitely was. USA sided with Pakistan against India as Pak committed genocide against Bangladeshis.

https://www.hindustantimes.com/delhi/revealed-pak-us-blackma...

Shortages happened before that too and even now

India was and still is a “non aligned” country, staying neutral during the Cold War but leaning Soviet Union when the Congress party was dominant. India was never under US sanction, although my memory is hazy if any was imposed during the nuclear crisis between India and Pakistan.

The US placed sanctions against India in the late 90s after India performed the nuclear bomb tests.

But explain shortages before that though

The US sanctions were very limited and temporary, and didn't restrict trade in food.

Turns out socialism isn't a great way to organize a food economy

Cuba trade with most countries in the world. North Korea is popped up by China. Iran should have no problems importing food with their huge oil revenue.

Russia is under the harshest sanction at the moment yet do you see any food shortage there? How about Belarus?

Perhaps their regime’s failure is the reason why some of those countries have food availability issue?

China too has an abysmal food self-sufficiency ratio, and it has been trending worse. Between 2000 and 2020, their food SSR dropped from 93% to 65%. This is a damning indictment of their government and economic system.

> SSR dropped from 93% to 65%. This is a damning indictment of their government and economic system.

The opposite. PRC SSR dropped because economy exploded and people can afford significantly more calories, including imported food products. Meanwhile absolute food security increased since 2000s baseline, grain production per capita went from ~350kg to ~400kg while adding ~200m people. Meanwhile SSR in SKR is 44%, JP is 38%, TW is 31%. Obviously, this is a damning indictment of their government and economic system.

When food demand skyrockets but production doesn't, that's a damning indictment of the system. Production should be scaling with that economic prosperity, but in the case of China it isn't. Other countries with economic prosperity and huge amounts of land have food SSR above 1. China's economic prosperity is masking the problem.

No it's just recognition that the problem is PRC has less ariable land and water resources per capita. Relative to other developed economies with comparable restraints, PRC's doing the the same thing of importing calories (and by extention, water) from ag exporters with excess agri resources, except PRC also smart enough to pursue absolute per capita food self sufficiency, hence demand skyrocketed AND domestic production of calories ALSO increased even relative to population increase. Not to mention within PRC capita GDP bracket (i.e. just below high income), PRC system actually delivers more calories and protein comparable to much wealthier countries - average PRC citizen gets to enjoy better diet due to the system.

I wonder how that works. Naive intuition tells me it should be the opposite - the market generally isn't capable of processing longtermist ideas like food self-sufficiency, so if that SSR drops, you'd imagine it's because as the food market became increasingly free and profit-based, it aligned itself with local preferences and global economy - meaning imports for price arbitrage, and imports for variety.

Ever noticed how former US enemies (China, Vietnam, East Germany, Czech Republic) that moved from socialism to capitalism don't have food shortages anymore?

"Capitulate or we'll starve you" is an effective rod.

The USSR managed to catastrophically mismanaged its agricultural policy to such a degree that people would had actually been at the risk of starvation there without food imports from the west which lasted for decades.

So what you’re implying is absurd.

To be fair former Warsaw pact countries didn’t necessarily really have that many shortages during the cold war. Yes certain products were hard to get but famine or even malnutrition weren’t a real concern

What about the other common thread that US enemies are all authoritarian? Ever notice that almost every authoritarian country is poorer than almost every liberal democracy?

Ever notice that China has a per-capita GDP lower than Costa Rica while Japan is 3.5x richer? Or that South Korea is 50-100x richer than North Korea?

> Ever noticed that somehow only US enemies have "food shortages" ?

Why did China have famines when it was essentially a US ally after WW2 (note US supported and helped China during WW2)

> Ever noticed that somehow only US enemies have "food shortages" ?

Ever notice that communist countries can prosper only if they trade with non-communist countries?

You shouldn't believe everything you read.

>Why did China have famines when it was essentially a US ally after WW2

What are you talking about? "China" aka Taiwan was a US ally following the war, but the US refused to acknowledge the existence of China for about 25 years after WW2. Even while essentially at war with China.

> Ever noticed that somehow only US enemies have "food shortages" ?

Are we going to pretend that a large chunk of Africa, Haiti, Myanmar, Sri Lanka all don't exist?

These "US enemies" you mention are actually all pretty far down the list in terms of severity of food insecurity.

I think you are the one who needs to find more unbiased news sources.

> Ever noticed that somehow only US enemies have "food shortages" ?

No, there are countries which the US doesn’t care about which also experience food shortages.

Also I can’t seem to tier your last two paragraphs together. Maybe you missed on sentences in between?

Look at this list: https://www.wfpusa.org/articles/global-food-crisis-10-countr....

Regarding North Korea, it's likely because the populance is under tight control of a ruthless military dictatorship. During the famines in the early 2000's Germany sent a larger part of it's BSE beef reserves (meat from ~400k head of cattle) [0] to North Korea, under the condition to ensure the issuance of the meat to the civil populance. Otherwise it was feared that this meat would just be confiscated by the military.

As a result certain German media outlets got unprecedented access to North Koreans going about their daily lives, because German humanitarian workers were allowed to freely travel across the country. I cannot find it right now, but ARTE/Discovery Channel produced a documentary where these workers were followed. There were some remarkable scenes in that documentary, it was like someone travelled back in time into the soviet union at it's lowest point. They also interviewed farmers and they put it in no certain terms that they knew they were living in a planned economy, but couldn't to much about it, since there was a constant threat of violence if they retaliated.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/feb/20/northkorea.fam...

Price controls work perfectly well as long as the government implements the necessary policies to backstop the market, whether that means nationalizing the suppliers and eating the difference in cost or subsidizing private companies. Venezuela and North Korea just don't have the foreign currency reserves required to do that.

Tons of countries like China and the United Kingdom have energy price controls. Rental price controls are everywhere around the world, both good and bad implementations abound.

Lots of countries have put price control on agricultural staples like rice and wheat. It's a relatively cheap way of guaranteeing social stability since the difference between the market price and the set price is relatively small and predictable per person, except in emergency situations like the world experienced with Russian gas and Ukrainian wheat. The best governments squirrel money away for rainy days like that, so that the price controls don't fall apart.

Price controls inevitably result in shortages since producers either sell their goods on the black market, or just refuse to produce in the first place.

Price controls only necessitate limiting what consumers are charged, not what producers earn - the government budgets for it and makes up the difference. Besides the most prominent examples of price controls in the US and Europe are almost always in response to shortages: Food Administration, Fuel Administration, Office of Price Administration, oil crisis, etc.

>United Kingdom have energy price controls

pretty limited ones speaking as a UK energy bill payer. And out energy ends up pretty expensive.

> Idk why governments think they can make things cheaper simply by just saying "this is now the new price and you can't change it".

Because authoritarian regimes and price controls are two sides of the same coin.

Economic power == political power

By ceding economic power to the public to kickstart their economy, authoritarian regimes would be ceding political power.

In contrast, by implementing price controls and vouchers/subsidies, they place the government in charge -- only government-permitted economic activity exists, which prevents people from gaining power themselves.

To those regimes, scarcity is preferable over price increases. Scarcity makes everyone grumble, but allows winners and losers (via the government choosing). Price increases just make everyone grumble and realize how poor they are (internationally speaking).

Or in summary, you're optimizing for efficient economic activity.

They're optimizing for regime stability and survival.

Living in one such country, with one such authoritarian dictator - this is one of most accurate explanation of why is this happening.

> By ceding economic power to the public to kickstart their economy, authoritarian regimes would be ceding political power.

China has figured it out so it's clearly possible.

Something like:

- strict one-party rule

- tight competition and selection process for leading party members (i.e. to become "president" you first have to successfully lead a city/province etc.)

- totalitarian speech control

- public "disappearances" of non-desirables to scare the rest of wannabe dissidents

- encourage economic growth, independence, entrepreneurship

- make "economic growth" one of the main political promises of your one-party totalitarian rule

- control economy only at the top (e.g. by disappearing entrepreneurs that become too powerful), laissez-faire otherwise

> tight competition and selection process for leading party members

This worked until it didn’t. Now Xi is a dictator making dictator-like mistakes.

There are valid additions to political thought the CCP has brought. But its solution to executive power is little evolved from the Roman monarchy. It counts on a serious of rationally-chosen benevolent autocrats who each pinky promise not to abolish term limits. It works until it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t, it fails spectacularly.

> on a serious of...benefactors...

Auto-correct is cancer

> China has figured it out so it's clearly possible.

They did not figure it out completely as seen during the disastrous economic policies during covid.

There's only a single developed dictatorship on earth, it's Singapore and it's still a debate if it's possible to achieve the same results outside of a city state.

That's a good point.

You see this in western countries w/ the housing crisis: fighting NIMBY groups is politically dangerous and creates powerful enemies. Plus liberalizing development policy like zoning = municipal gov loses power to control which developers get juicy contracts.

So instead they enact rent-control. Which famously in 1970s NYC/Toronto caused a significant increase in housing shortage because no one wanted to invest in new properties for fear they'll also be rent controlled in the future. No one did renovations either so existing stock went into disrepair.

Some of them simply burned down their own buildings because they were too expensive to maintain, which was a major cause behind the famous pictures of Harlem looking like a warzone in the 80s. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/59af5625a803bb...

I was just reading the website for the new (projected) mayor of Toronto and, surprise, no mention of reform. But she is planning to launch a campaign for city wide rent control. Some things never change.

I think you need to actually take a step back and realize how complicated the world actually is.

Brazil is one of the major exporters of food in the world. And they get most of their fertilizer from Russia. Russia is cranking up their prices because of the trade war being enacted on them because of their actions in Ukraine.

Brazil had also imported a ton of wheat from Ukraine before the war. And is full of people that couldn't really afford a 15% increase in price versus the over 100% increase in retail price of wheat.

Just ask google who the top producers of -fertilizer- are. You can't farm without it.

10% of US households experienced food insecurity in 2021: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...

Yet those households largely have an obesity problem. Our standard for quantifying "food insecurity" arent similar to actual starvation and food shortages

"food insecurity" is an extremely broad brush, and has nothing to do with abundance. Many homes where members of the home are obese qualify as "food insecure" because they don't buy fruits and/or vegetables.

The USDA doesn't ask why, they just ask if there are fruits/vegetables in the house, and if the answer is no, they mark the home as "food insecure".

Another questions is whether you worry that you might not have enough food at some point in the future YEAR.

Frankly, the metric becomes obviously meaningless once you read all eight questions.

I grew up relatively poor, however my parents still made sure we didn't eat pure junk food out of frozen food boxes. We ate potatoes, lentils, beans, rice, pasta, lot of cheap veggies like cabbage. Parents grew some stuff too since we had a small garden, and I try to keep up that tradition in my back yard even though I'm much much better off income wise now. Families don't have to eat junk food, there's still plenty bulk stuff around. Not super cheap but at least as cheap as the processed garbage if you buy the raw ingredients.

> countries like Venezuela struggle to feed their own people in the modern era

The US would also struggle to feed their own people if they were not subsidizing (something that is considered a crime in capitalism) their own farmers to the tune of several billion dollars a year. This is the reality of modern economies, farming pays close to nothing, and the only way to feed your population is to put large amounts of money into subsidies, something which South America, Africa, and other regions of the world don't have.

> Idk why governments think they can make things cheaper simply by just saying "this is now the new price and you can't change it".

Probably because it often works, which is why both Biden and Trump have imposed prescription drug price controls, why Bush imposed energy price controls, and why Nixon and FDR imposed across the board price controls.

The last time we were seriously threatened in a war we did it; the last time we faced an inflation crisis we did it; and we’re doing it now with arguably the most expensive good for the fastest growing part of our population (seniors). If it doesn’t work, why do we keep doing it whenever we are in crisis?

It works in some cases and doesn’t in others. That’s basic microeconomics.

100 percent. OP was asking why governments try it - the answer is “it works in some cases” as you say. (Some people seem to believe it can never work.)

Communism no food vuvuzela iphone

From the graphs in the article, the current price of rice is 5 and it was 4 pre-pandemic.

The unit of the price is in foreign currency, and we know there has been significant inflation in the last few years, so that looks like it is showing no significant change from then to now.

There were spikes during border closings during the pandemic, but this is in a border region where smuggling is prevalent, and the spikes are in foreign-currency based prices. They don’t have a way to normalize for effects such as less supply of foreign goods leading to less demand for foreign currency (which could have caused the foreign currency’s value to temporarily crash inside the black market.)

The prices in my supermarket have gone up more than the prices in north korea.

Tangentially related but this is one of the most fascinating thing about China. The last famine they had ended around 1961. That means that people who are in their sixties probably knew someone that starved to death. Imagine being born to a country where people were starving to death to a prosperous country within your lifetime.

but the great famine was very much man(Mao)-made... of course the economic boom was a great achievement, but it's different from what you're suggesting I think.

Also loosely related, the Homo Deus book has a chapter about how humans conquered technically what it classifies as the major challenges that we attributed to gods, including hunger, plagues, and war. It mentions that nowadays, if any of these things cause human destruction it is a political thing and someone somewhere wants that to happen.

Technologically, what do we have that stops famines from happening?

Like, are we really immune from some mega drought occuring somewhere that mostly depends on rainfall? Or is that just extremely unlikely to happen, especially at a large scale?

A lot of this probably depends on who "we" refers to. I would imagine that many regions are not immune to a mega drought.

For the West specifically, wealthier nations can kind of just export the shortage by paying more for supplies that would go elsewhere.

The West also feeds most of its crops to animals, so that is an area for relatively easy reduction in an emergency. 67% of what is grown in the USA is animal food. But that proportion is dramatically lower in places like India.

https://www.vox.com/2014/8/21/6053187/cropland-map-food-fuel...

No we are not immune. At all

We can now buy grain in bulk and ship it anywhere through the world.

There are theories which say that nuclear war, due to firestorms in cities transporting soot into the upper atmosphere, would lead to nuclear winter, which would lead to a global famine:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pMsnCieusmYqGW26W/...

However, the papers which predict such scenarios have been criticized as being too pessimistic:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jnDibtfvWNHLucf4D/actually-a...

We can move food around. Famines historically tended to be regional; bad climate, or natural or man-made disaster, devastating food production in an area. Before the 19th century moving enough food from another region, or even from another continent to address that local shortfall, was much more challenging.

If the 1930s American dustbowl had happened to a densely populated non-industrial society, it would probably have been one of the worst famines in history. Agricultural yields fell by like 50% for several years in the affected region. But they just brought in food from California and Saskatchewan. It was still a disaster, of course.

The Russian famine of 1921 was one of the first times industrial societies really mobilized in that way. At the peak grain grown in the USA and donated to the USSR was feeding about 1 in 10 Russians during the famine. One of the largest logistics operations in history up to that point. It's why Herbert Hoover was nominated for the Nobel peace prize five times.

Famines are primarily a political problem, not a technological problem. Our technology has improved agricultural productivity and distribution efficiency, but that doesn't matter when men with guns are stealing food from starving people.

is it even that blatant? it's in shipping containers that aren't going to be released to the starving because of this simple concept known as paying for things.

It often is that blatant. Even when international donors send free food it often ends up getting seized by government forces or militant groups.

This was the first thing that popped into my head too as I read Homo Deus a few months ago.

A very accessible book for all. I recommend it. It’s not perfect but it’s a good, easy read compared to other books touching on the same subjects.

It was greatly worsened by Mao's policies. But a famine would have happened anyway. There's no alternate history where different government policy in China could have completely averted the famine of 1960. It was a very poor year agriculturally.

There had been famine in China previously in 1942 (1 million dead), 1936 (5 million dead), 1929 (5 million dead), 1906 (25 million dead), 1877 (10 million dead), and millions dead from starvation during the Taiping rebellion of the 1860s.

Arguably, quite a few of them were man-made, or at least man-aggravated from warfare. This is not intended as apologia for Mao. His policies likely resulted in several million more deaths than might have otherwise happened. I just want to show that famine was routine in preindustrial agricultural societies.

> His policies likely resulted in several million more deaths than might have otherwise happened.

Perhaps more than several million when estimates are between 15 and 55 million dead.

Just imagine all the coffins / mass burials during COVID and times that by thousands. Must have devastated whole communities and scared them for life.

Mass burials during Covid? I think you might be misremembering.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52241221

> which has been used for more than 150 years by city officials as a mass burial site for those with no next-of-kin, or families who cannot afford funerals.

Interesting. Good to know and also not the impression I got from just "mass burials".

> Normally, about 25 bodies a week are interred on the island, according to the Associated Press news agency. But burial operations have increased from one day a week to five days a week, with around 24 burials each day

> It is not clear how many of the dead have no next-of-kin or could not afford a funeral.

That's a pretty important question to answer. Any idea?

And that was early enough in understanding COVID that it would make sense to do this kind of small mass burial with hazmat suits even if the death rate was unchanged.

> The drone footage comes from Hart Island, off the Bronx in Long Island Sound, which has been used for more than 150 years by city officials as a mass burial site for those with no next-of-kin, or families who cannot afford funerals.

> Normally, about 25 bodies a week are interred on the island, according to the Associated Press news agency.

> But burial operations have increased from one day a week to five days a week, with around 24 burials each day, said Department of Correction spokesman Jason Kersten.

They always did mass burials at this site. It just increased velocity during COVID. Mass burials did not start because of COVID.

Has there been any famous industrialized capitalist countries during famines? I'm curious how they fared.

The Great Irish Famine springs to mind, caused by the policies of the United Kingdom, which arguably invented both industrialization (hello, steam engine) and capitalism (hello, Adam Smith).

I think it would be hard to argue that Ireland at that time was a "great, industrialized society" of any sort.

It was run by such a society - the British. Capitalism was even cited as a justification at the time. If the "market" decided to export food while the Irish starved... well, thats ok. Market knows best.

It essentially mirrored the Holodomor - an occupying power exports all the food from an agrarian colony during a bad harvest. Famine happens. Occupying power shrugs. People wonder if it was a covert attempt at ethnic cleansing. Probably it was.

The difference is that the Irish famine was oh, just a big whoopsie while the Holodomor was an evil plot.

Other than the reality of British occupation, I think most of what you said was provably wrong.

For example...

> The difference is that the Irish famine was just a big whoopsie while the Holodomor was an evil plot.

Have you heard of Charles Trevelyan? He was in charge of relief efforts during the famine, but he had a different take on the issue which informed British policy. In his words:

“The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.”

The Famine was a natural disaster which would have led to some amount of starvation and death, but that natural disaster was GREATLY enhanced by British elites who saw it as a convenient and "natural" solution to Irish overpopulation.

In many ways it shares the hallmarks of the Holodomor, with "we care about trade" used as a cover for genocide.

You seem to be agreeing with everything I wrote apart from the sarcasm.

In 1760 the Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain, in 1801 Ireland joined with Great Britain to form the United Kingdom, and in 1845 the great famine began in the United Kingdom, specifically in Ireland. I'm afraid this feels like moving the goalposts; famine is always going to hit agricultural areas the hardest in any trade-capable country, because even though everyone else still needs food, everyone else still has things to trade for food (and if the agricultural laborers still had anything to trade, there wouldn't be a famine to begin with). It's a bit like saying that the Dust Bowl didn't happen in the industrialized nation of the United States because it happened in Oklahoma.

Fact is that the famine could have easily be averted or at least reduced to a huge extent by the government.

Post-WW2 Germany comes to mind.

Also post WW1 Germany or rather post armistice pre-Versailles when hundreds of thousands died and millions suffered from malnutrition due to the allied blockade (which they maintained “just in case” Germany decided to restart the war..)

I'm not an agronomist, but even back then, couldn't grain be stored for a year or two to buffer a disaster?

China had, since the 1860's, been referred to as the "sick man of the far east", a play on words from a common monicker for I think one of the tzars.

Mostly, this referred to the Qing government, in terms of the extensive corruption, pervasive opium addiction (thanks in part to Britain and the opium wars), etc.

Poor people rarely had much to eat to begin with, and bad years would often mean normally thin meals would be stretched too far. Until the communist revolution, farmers were serfs. After, they operated in collectives, but still were under orders. In both cases, they had little incentive to work, as they didn't keep the food they grew. It belonged to someone else. 1 in 3 children nationwide had stunted growth from malnourishment, almost certainly worse in the countryside. Farmers simply didn't have a surplus of food to store through an entire bad season.

After the 1970s, a combination of infrastructure projects which improved irrigation, some new cultivars of plants that had better yields, and changes to the operations of the farming communes to operate a bit more capitalistically, farmers were able to generate actual surpluses of food.

The original "sick man of the East" was Ottoman Turkey.

>There's no alternate history where different government policy in China could have completely averted the famine of 1960. It was a very poor year agriculturally.

Except the one where China hasn't destroyed much of its industry, or alienated much of the world, and thus can trade for food.

Your examples are illustrative as well, inspite of your intention - the next three famines you list (1942, 1936, 1929) all occurred during a civil war in which Mao was a major player on one side, and at a time when part of the country was at war with/under occupation of imperial Japan.

Europe had a world war ending in 1945. It was quite prosperous in a few decades; in part, it never ceased to be.

If you ask me, world war is on the same level of personal danger.

I think Germany is probably the most impressive one. Lost both World wars, had to deal with the East West unification and is now the biggest economy in Europe which is crazy to think about.

Eh almost none of WW1 was fought in German soil so they came out of WW1 with most of their economic capacity intact minus several million young men.

And World War 2 saw a complete leveling of most of the country…

But then massive investment by the US.

Sure but parent comment is blowing off a lot of factors working against Germany’s spectacular recovery lol. “Several million young dead men” is a bit of an understatement too

but, owing to cultural changes, it turns out that women can also perform the work necessary for an economy to function.

Losing millions of your own population isn’t something that can be brushed off.

It’s not like those women were doing nothing before, so something else gets deprioritized.

We also had a mass-hunger event in Eastern Romania in 1947, partly as a result of the war and partly because of a dreadful drought season.

That's what modern Chinese politics expert call "the mandate from the heavens". As long as the average (Han) Chinese gets richer, they won't mind the oppressive regime and the collectivist nature of the CCP (welding doors shut for COVID, workers as replaceable cogs).

But should the prosperity slow or stop, the CCP knows it'll lose the "mandate". That's why the Evergrande collapse was such a big deal [0], and the reason the Yuan will never replace the US dollar as the world's reserve currency. The Chinese regime has to "save face" and show progress at all costs. All while having a negative brain drain, gender imbalance and worsening demography.

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/24/investing/china-evergrande-gr...

Yup, the real estate market is absolutely insane. If you rent out a place you should be approximately covering the mortgage with it--but over there in many places that's off by an order of magnitude.

Despite that the government is still encouraging real estate.

"mandate from heavens" is the oriental version of "consented of the governed" in the West.

That's a strange way to frame a lack of post war progress. In most countries the experience of anyone born before the war who was starting their own family in 1960 was at a speed that is hard to imagine. China is remarkable for its continuity.

China went into WWII as a pre-industrial barely post-feudal society in the middle of a civil war.

My grandfather died of smallpox and I'm in my 30s. A lot of things we think of as history were really not that long ago.

On the other side of things too, predictions out to 2100 felt like weird sci-fi until I realised my kids could be alive and in their 80s.

I think this is a significant reason why authoritarian figures like Xi and Putin have strong support from the populace.

"strong support from the populous" How do you know when the populous can't even say what is on their mind without their families getting slaughter?

The typical person in china don’t fear that, at least in private conversation. The problems only really appear when you have a broad audience.

> The last famine they had ended around 1961.

That was a manufactured crisis too. Stupid rules and practices were imposed and they cause carnage.

Disagree--the deaths were not remotely evenly distributed. My wife lived through that--to her it was lean times, not starvation. That's because she's from Shanghai, not the countryside.

What are you disagreeing about?

Disagreeing that everyone knew someone who starved.

The very uneven distribution of the deaths means that many of the survivors don't know anyone who died from it. My wife knows it as a time of hunger, not a time of death.

I think the change in circumstances in some Middle Eastern countries has been even more dramatic. Places like Abu Dhabi were small towns with houses made of mud/palm fronds in the 1960s.

Now think of people in so many other countries who have seen the exact opposite in their lifetimes.

The BBC did a good piece on this a few weeks ago that includes multiple interviews with people in NK

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiviOdWDl9o

Hasn't most of the world had a similar rise in food price over this period? Wouldn't that naturally negatively impact the poorest, such as the North Koreans?

> Hasn't most of the world had a similar rise in food price over this period? Wouldn't that naturally negatively impact the poorest, such as the North Koreans?

How much food does North Korea import?

My understanding is that North Korea is extremely isolated from the rest of the world; to the extent that that is true, it isolates them from global inflation in food prices.

Not just food, but energy and machinery as well.

And North Korea does have imports, mostly from China.

Why only sell production locally when you can export for hard currency?

NK imports almost all their calories. The problem is at the start of COVID they shut down all imports into the country and that has made survival nearly impossible for many people.

nk domestically produces about 2/3 of it's total food supply. and they are getting better at domestic fertilizer production and increasing the amount of land under the plow every year. their main issue with domestic food self reliance is largely two things. low grade and low volume fertilizer, and natural disasters (typhoons and droughts). NK is like 2 or 3 good years in a row away from being able to produce it's food domesticly

They are isolated but they do import food, mainly rice and wheat products, from China and to a lesser extent Russia (according to Wikipedia).

The article says those Chinese imports have largely dried up though

It said they did during COVID, and that you can see prices stabilized as trade resumes.

Probably impacts the poorest countries the most since the last mile portion of food is a lower proportion of their end user price.

> When comparing current price levels with historical ones, the overall picture suggests that market prices, since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting border closure by the North Korean government, have moved to a consistently higher level, which indicates that the country’s overall food supply is lower.

The same thing happened in EU countries. Shall we conclude that there is a food shortage in EU ?

Why doesn't SK find a way to feed the north in hopes for good propaganda and perhaps save a few lives? Or do they? Entirely uneducated on the subject, just seems an obvious win/win.

Any idea why China and Russia keep North Korea in such a bad shape, it is not in their interest to not have this regime collapse and get "infected" with freedom and human rights?

Do you mean why they don't let it die?

Are they helping? From the BBC article I read a week ago the people are starving, so they are letting them die, is bad PR at least for Russia that points at N Korea as an ally and friend and a model of a country that is not "degenerate"

If there are 10 starving people and I feed 9 of them, am I helping?

They don't run the place, and they simply keep it propped up as a proxy defense against the "Western" South Korea.

This is my point, the people starve so they are doing a bad job at propping it up - a rebellion can start and their "Ally and friend" is gone.

Propping up an entire failed county is hard. China does a lot better in NK than the US did in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Why would be hard, they can put them to work in factory to do cheap shit and give them food.

Or alternatively, people aren’t in fact starving and wouldn’t consider rebellion.

It wouldn’t be the first time western media consistently lied about something.

I'm sure news coming from an organization controlled by a foundation whose CEO is a retired US military general is entirely reliable and unbiased, and should be taken at face value without any qualms.

I get the point you're trying to make, but it is possible

They link to all their sources. Do you disagree with the facts they quote, or the conclusions they reached from those facts?

I'll call bullshit on it then. The sources they cite are unverifiable, to the point where you can make up whatever you like and I'm just expected to assume it's true because "journalistic integrity"

I have no faith nor trust in journalists in current year. Even more so about anything to do with NK.

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