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Comment by nkskalyan | Hacker News Reader

Food transportation is NOT a big contributor to global warming. Bulk transportation, especially with ships is one of the most efficient ways of moving things around the globe. https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local

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A quote from that article "Transport is a small contributor to emissions. For most food products, it accounts for less than 10%, and it’s much smaller for the largest GHG emitters. In beef from beef herds, it’s 0.5%."

Yes, so the transportation of food is a small portion of the greenhouse emissions involved with producing that food.

Trying to grow food locally with lower economies of scale may in turn result in higher emissions. In any case, it's not going to massively lower emissions.

This - as most of this thread - reads like some well-crafted well put-together propaganda coming straight from some Paul R. Ehrlich type talking head of a person. Even if I would trust the data you provided, there is still the monoculture vs polycultlure in relation to fertilizer usage, job market, food security, microclimate aspects - each of which would require a separate thread. There is a whole socioeconomic ecosystem build around local farming, most post-communist countries had world-class agri systems in place before it was taken apart after 1989 (with local fertilizer production due to local beef production).

> most post-communist countries had world-class agri systems in place

citation needed

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_Communist_Czech...

Not advocating for some 7year-planning nightmare, this is solely related to the local vs globalized production aspect of this chaotic discussion

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