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Comment by TheChaplain | Hacker News Reader

That will be interesting experiment. 1) A growing population require food. 2) Their agricultural sector is a major contributor to their economy, not only farmers but everything around it involves a lot of people and businesses. 3) Many countries rely on Danish agricultural exports (it's massive) to ensure people have food.

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The Danish agricultural industry accounts for 1% of GDP and almost 70% of land use, the highest in the world. The Wikipedia page on Denmark doesn't even bother to list it as a major industry (unlike Lego) and the only figures I could find put it at around 8B DKK. Lego does 66B DKK on its own.

What criteria are you using?

Lego is not edible. they'll need food in the coming war.

By the last metric I saw, Denmark produces food for about 12 million people, and that's mainly animal products. Denmark has a population of 6 million.

Cutting food production in half would not jeopardize food security. Switching focus to plant-based food production would more than double it again.

Jesus, what war are you talking about?

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/11/25/d...

Its a special military operation, right?

In all earnesty, what does it change to send troops to Ukraine? What did any of these red lines we European were afraid of help?

Should not send tanks, it could start a war.

Should not send planes, it could start a war.

Should not allow Ukraine to attack inside Russia, it could start a war.

I'm all for defending Ukraine, it's just that it would have been good to have the USA on side.

(Dane here) - this is a major reversal on the food-security policy that drove not just innovation in intensive farming technologies in Denmark in the late nineteenth century, but also the formation of what is now the EU, post WWII, on a european scale.

Let's hope butter and bacon from Poland is going to cover our needs.

Our issues in The Netherlands are probably similar to Denmark's and the biggest issue is not all agriculture. Meat and milk production has an outweighed impact on destroying the environment. You need far more land to grow crops to feed livestock and keeping cows leads to a lot of nitrogen deposition.

We can reduce land use and have food security if people were not so intend on eating/drinking animal products every day (and there are perfectly fine vegetarian alternatives).

I believe the insistence on being a major agricultural producer in the EU despite having some of the largest population densities in the region has a lot to do with it.

A huge chunk of that output is purely for export.

That depends on how you define "perfectly fine". All of the vegetarian alternatives have a lower protein quality index, which matters if you're trying to get enough of the essential amino acid s without increasing calorie intake.

https://doi.org/10.3389/fnut.2024.1406618

> Let's hope butter and bacon from Poland is going to cover our needs.

Pole here - Poland switched form being a pork exporter to an importer over the course of the last few decades.

Top external suppliers are...

Denmark (53kt)

Belgium (50kt)

Germany (44kt)

The Netherlands (24.5kt)

Spain (24.5kt)

> Let's hope butter and bacon from Poland is going to cover our needs.

That's really hilarious: Poland imports it's pork from Denmark.

(ASF and almost no piglets breeding)

If we end up going hungry (or food prices spiking), then this policy might be adjusted.

It's not like this will happen overnight anyways.

> A growing population require food.

Sure, but Europe's not growing. It is purely in "shrink forever" mode. This is easily measured, any time fertility drops below 2.1 that's what happens. But ignore that a moment, what if you wanted to depopulate Europe? This might be a good policy for that. Get the timing just right, and it's not even a genocide... food shortages that don't starve anyone just encourages the last few breeders to put a lid on it, and voila! The fantasy of more than a few out there.

Have past instances of 2.1 fertility also had increased lifespan and immigration?

There have never been past instances. We had a much higher fertility rate, then it just plummeted. It hit 2.1 and plunged below that moments later.

Increased lifespans will soon come to an end, but even if magically they could remain you'd just end up on a planet where everyone's too old to have children anymore, and human extinction is locked in. Every second fertility rate's below 2.1, there are fewer people of reproductive age and within your own lifetime there won't even be enough of those to sustain a world population in the tens of millions if suddenly they switched back to 2.1 (and they won't). This is doomsday. But be sure to have fewer children to reduce your carbon footprint.

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