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Comment by Galaxeblaffer | Hacker News Reader

Denmarks agricultural performance is not great at all. it's way too expensive to produce stuff. if it wasn't for EU subsidies the agricultural sector in Denmark would loose over 50% of their profits. To drive the point home the agricultural sector in Denmark only makes up 3.6% of the bnp and 4.3% of exports while taking up 60% of Denmarks total area and employing around 3.9% of the working population. i think Denmark can easily let go of 10% while only having miniscule effects on the economy. Denmark is a very small country and technically has no truly wild nature.

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> Denmarks agricultural performance is not great at all. it's way too expensive to produce stuff. if it wasn't for EU subsidies the agricultural sector in Denmark would loose over 50% of their profits.

Agriculture in the EU is renowned for not being financially unjustified. For decades it's been a finantial no-brainer to import the bulk of agricultural products from south America and Africa. This is not new or the result of some major epiphany, it's the natura consequence of having an advanced economy and a huge population with high population density. The EU already imports 40% of the agricultural products it consumes.

EU subsidies were created specifically to mitigate the strategic and geopolitical risk of seeing Europe blockaded. Agricultural subsidies exist to create a finantial incentive to preserve current production capacity when it makes no finantial sense, and thus mitigate a strategic vulnerability.

> specifically to mitigate the strategic and geopolitical risk of seeing Europe blockaded

No, its because far lobbies are an important political block

Both can be true.

Protecting your agricultural capacity is what convinces the part of the population that does not directly benefit from the subsidies.

That's just admitting that it is just justification.

Yes and? If it keeps 20% of the country alive during a twice in a century event that it's a good justification.

> No, its because far lobbies are an important political block

Wrong. If you try to educate yourself, you will notice that EU's common agricultural policy even went to the extent of paying subsidies to small property owners to preserve their properties as agricultural land. This goes way beyond subsidizing production, or anything remotely related to your conspiracy theory.

Just because someone benefits from subsidy programs that does not mean that any conspiracy theory spun around the inversion of cause and effect suddenly makes sense. I recommend you invest a few minutes to learn about EU's common agricultural policy before trying to fill that void with conspiracies.

They can write all they want. The fact is, the countries wouldn't cant get rid of their farm policies because of voting. And the EU, is an outgrowth of those already existing countries. EU policy is not handed down from a white tower. Of course you can't actually say that.

Farmers and people supporting farmers are still a small minority and while they can probably swing some election in some country if they were to massively support only one party or coalition, the money comes for the strategic importance. It would be naive to think it's just "for the votes".

It was a long time ago that I have looked into this. My understanding from the political science is that countries where farmers votes aren't as important, also have far less subsidizes.

Groups that already have subsidizes are better at defending them. Even if in absolute terms their numbers aren't as big.

They are totally going to defend themselves, mainly through boycotts, barricades and varying degrees of riots. That can totally cause a vote issue, but it's because the rest of the population is pissed off by the road blocks etc

Resistance to a blockade doesn’t require subsidies for growing flowers etc.

Subsidizing exports similarly has very different goals.

Sure it does. The goal is keep the farmland available and productive along with keeping agricultural infrastructure. The USA helped win WW2 because our car factory lines were retooled to make war machines.

Demand for war materials goes up in a war, but the population and thus food demand isn’t going to drastically spike.

There’s a reasonable argument for having a food stockpile in case of emergencies, but extra farmland is harder to justify.

You are going to stockpile years worth of food for an entire country?

No, if you expect farmland to produce 0 food then having extra farmland is pointless. 0 * 2 X = 0 * X = 0.

The point of extra farmland is to make up for some expected shortfall, but you’re better off stockpiling food during productive periods than have reserve capacity for use when something else is going wrong.

PS: It is common to have quite large stockpiles of food. Many crops come in once a year and then get used up over that year. But that assumes a 1:1 match between production and consumption, a little extra production = quite a large surplus in a year.

In the case of the US, we turned much of the richest farmland into subdivisions. The breadbasket of the nation is powered by an aquifer that will be depleted in my kids lifetime. Most of our green goods come from the deserts of California and Arizona, and won’t exist if the Colorado River water system breaks down.

That aquifer is being depleted because of farm subsidies not in spite of them.

The US’s domestic demand for food is vastly below the actual production, exports and biofuels need not be maintained in a war.

The demand won't spike, but the need to switch to local production necessitates some way to locally produce.

That’s limited by the country’s basic requirements not the total amount of farmland available. People may prefer wine and beef in surplus resulting in an obesity epidemic, but that’s not required here. You don’t want 350 lb soldiers or recruits.

The government has all sorts of policy goals. Resilience, employment, etc.

In the US, Nixon era policy and legal thinking drives all things. Price is king, except it isn’t. Our crazy governance model means that corn is better represented than humans, so our food is more expensive, less nutritious, and our supply chains are incredibly fragile.

You'd think that people would have realized this after Europe avoided mass death from Russian gas being cut off only because the winter was mild.

Considering that we're doing the barest of the minimum about it three years in, yeah, you'd think.

We’re off to a not-great start this year: https://gas.kyos.com/gas/eu

Interesting way to frame "Russian gas being cut off" instead of "most likely US orchestrated biggest ally to ally sabotage in history".

I'm still mad about it, yes. Germany's dependence on Russian gas was a terrible thing, but risking my livelihood for 4D geopolitics chess is much worse.

This doesn't change the strategic need to maintain local production though.

Germany's dependence on Russian gas was (failed) 4D geopolitical chess in itself. I'm mad at that.

> the winter was mild.

Sure about that? I remember a cold winter.

> Blizzards, record winds, red weather warnings and biting cold. The long winter of 2023/2024 has featured heavy precipitation and a number of extreme weather events.

https://www.uu.se/en/news/2024/2024-03-04-a-researcher-expla...

And

> Large parts of Europe are starting the 2023-2024 winter season with an abundance of snow and cold, a stark contrast from last year, which was abnormally warm and snowless.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/12/04/europe-sno...

I think you meant financial

Let me get this right. To save the planet Denmark wants to stop producing food locally and instead import more? So those pig farts gotta go but the bunker fuel used to ship grain from a slash and burn rainforest farm in Brazil is a-ok.

Utterly brain dead. So much so that you know someone’s getting paid from these decisions.

you got it.. and grain is not the only thing we get shipped from Brazil.. to look green, we've replaced most our coal burning for energy with bio fuels, essentially wood and that gets shipped in from Brazil as well.. very green.. because fuck nuclear, because of.. checks notes.. reasons

and Brazil does that while keeping 60% of its territory as native forests.

What's your source for 4.3% of exports? This source says 22%.

https://agricultureandfood.dk/media/m1qfuuju/lf-facts-and-fi...

i admit that i haven't read the sources listed here

https://www.dyrenesbeskyttelse.dk/artikler/landbrugets-bundl...

and also that this source is probably biased toward minimizing the numbers while your source might be pulling in the other direction. the true number is probably somewhere in between and depends on what you include. like, could the raw products be imported instead and the refined in Denmark without those 22% taking a hit?

You are posting literal propaganda from the biggest agro lobbyist. That number is about the "Danish food cluster". That is all food related business output. Enzyme production and such. They have tried for a long time to conflate the farming sector with the whole food industry to muddy their importance.

3.6% of bnp seems like little but I think agriculture counts for more than, say, management consulting that goes through 5 intermediaries (does it get counted towards the bnp 5x then? I'm not sure). At the end of the day money is only an abstraction while food, you can actually eat it.

yes, but like 50-70% of the crops grown is animal feed. if Denmark really needed efficient food for the population i think the whole thing could be done more efficiently and those 10% won't be missed.

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