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Comment by throwagri | Hacker News Reader

The worst thing is that many countries fail to produce staple food of the population instead depend on other countries and blame them when they fail to secure the produce.

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Unlike the economy, food is a zero sum game. Most produce has a limited lifespan, unless you opt to freeze everything, which is not something all consumers desire or buy. This means that most food that leaves the farm must be consumed within a narrow window. Only exporting and importing food from diverse regions will allow you to minimise food waste and therefore have an efficient low-cost market. This also creates countries that are great net exporters.

That is a narrow view. A lot of foodstuff gets processed into stable products with a shelf life, and grain can be stored for years.

Even in the hypothetical scenario where all vegetables and meat have shelf lives of a year, it still wouldn't make that much of a difference when it comes to food security. Products with long shelf life are sold with that long shelf life. This does mean that any kind of failed harvest means that those products will either disappear out of the selection or a different formula is used to maintain availability. Companies dont store anything, governments only store rice and grains at most since they are the only economically feasable types. Citicens will actively induce food shortage once there is one.

All you're left with is figuring out how much food is between the harvest and the supermarket. And that's not alot. Demand matches the consumption of citizens and time to market is optimised to be short. This is before considering how unhealthy the most durable foods are since sugar is the main ingredient in all of them, from chips and chocolate to processed cans.

Food security != food choice. If there’s zero avocado’s worldwide people can still cheaply eat a healthy diet. However, what normally happens is prices rise in one food and people then substitute something else.

There’s also huge food stockpiles worldwide simply because crops like North American corn get harvested in the fall and then supplied over the next year. At which point we can cut biofuel production should an actual shortage occur.

Most calories that most people eat come from grains which can be stored for years. This article is about that. The economics of produce are much different.

Assigning responsibility and agency to state policies for agriculture and targeting self-sufficiency would work quite poorly in today's world. The modern world is fed by growing stuff in places where it grows best, and trading food for other stuff. This also provides robustness against localized crop failures. (And sadly feeding most of that to badly treated farm animals...)

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