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Comment by 0xy | Hacker News Reader

Do you think food production has national security implications or do you think "the market" will be happy to sell you food during another global conflict while their own citizens are starving?

Farming subsidies are a national security tool, not a handout.

Anyway, it's clear that your position is political in nature otherwise you'd be just as outraged by green subsidies.

Denmark set aside DKK 53.5 billion for green subsidies in 2022. But this isn't market distortion to the same degree as farming subsidies, is it? That's the flaw in your argument. It's inconsistently applied based on politics, isn't it?

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There’s a big difference between supporting food security and subsidising otherwise unviable land usage and farming practices. In the UK, there are subsidies for upland farming for sheep with produces a negligible amount of food at high cost (monetary and environmental) for next to no return for the farmers even after the subsidy.

Re. green subsidies that is better characterised as investment in technology of the future. You might also like to compare subsidies to the fossil fuel sector as well.

How does having such a large surplus that you’re an exporter of food jive with national security? It sounds like they already produce more than enough. Exposing food production entirely to market forces is, as you point out, a bad idea.

Sounds like you’ve fallen for some farmer rhetoric.. How is growning crops to feed 28 million pigs to 6 million people? We’d have to eat 5 pigs each.. If it was really about food security, we’d surely plant crops to eat ourselves, which is much more efficient in terms of calorie per m^2.

Meat has many more negative externalities than plants. Thats the argument for substituting green farming.

Of course it’s political.. anything is to some degree.

Because of animals we grow far more grain than we need, giving us a substantial amount of necessary slack. If there is a wide spread crop failure, the price of grain rises, causing ranchers to sell breeding stock they can no longer afford to feed. Then humans then eat the grain instead of the animals.

Growing x100 times the amount of food needed isn’t ‘slack’, its production for export (or feeding pigs to export). We could cut out farmland by 50% and still have more than enough to feed our own population. This food security argument would only hold if there was any possibility of us actually not being able to feed our population.

100X? A chicken is 1.8x and a pig is 3X. A cow is 12X, but that'd only be a relevant figure if humans could eat grass.

> How does having such a large surplus (...)

You should educate yourself. Europe imports around 40% of the agricultural production it consumes.

The "surplus" is referenced in economical value and reflects luxury exports such as wine, which is hardly what keeps Europe alive in case of all-out war.

The whole point of Europe's common agricultural policy is food security including an event of all-out war.

Your comments sound like advocating against having a first-aid kit just because you sell silk scarves.

Please provide some sources, because I think your 40% is also based on monetary and not nutritional value.

Wouldn't it be a beautiful world if wine could keep Europe alive in case of an all-out war

Destroying fisheries goes directly against food security. Fishes are more efficient as source of food by energetic reasons.

I don’t understand why this is being downvoted but this is very true, and it’s the literal case that the fisheries around the entirety of the Bornholm region of Denmark have been completely shut down because the farming industry runoff destroyed it. Had it not been for subsidies the farming industry wouldn’t have done this. We literally paid people to deliberately destroy our environment. Is insane and everyone’s just looking to the sky like “what are we supposed to do? We’ve tried nothing at all even though there has been consistent warnings for two decades and it still happened!?”

> Anyway, it's clear that your position is political in nature otherwise you'd be just as outraged by green subsidies.

The green subsidies are also paid out to farmers… it is outrageous. Imagine if we were still paying subsidies to weavers because of their “strategic importance in case of war” and also paying them green subsidies to avoid using the toxic chemicals they would otherwise use doing the thing they are only doing in the first place because it justifies the theater that has the state maintaining their consistent income.

Well they aren’t really subsidizing based on having everything you need on shore. They still specilize into a few monocrops and have to trade to fill the rest of a balanced diet for the population. No one is calculating how much butter would be needed to last a multi year siege and dolling out subsidize to the dairy farmers on that I don’t think.

> Farming subsidies are a national security tool, not a handout.

It's absurd to not acknowledge they are both.

This is often the justification but in many countries agriculture systems are not oriented towards food security: they produce a large share of export crops/products and thus also rely on imports. If they were an actual national security tool, they would be more focus on not relying on imports and not helping exports, right?

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