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Comment by deepsun | Hacker News Reader

Every country subsidies their agriculture for national security purpose. You don't want an enemy to starve you in case of a big war.

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Name one country which is fully self-sustaining.

Agricultural subsidies exist primarily due to lobbying, the "we don't want to starve" argument is nothing more than an excuse used to justify the fortunes handed out to corporate-scale farmers.

France, USA, Australia to name 3 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_food_self...).

1. That's almost 20 years old data. 2. That's just calories.

Here's more recent data: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-025-01173-4

Appears to me, like neither country is fully self-sufficient.

Your link is about a healthy diet, not surviving. Agricultural subsidies are to avoid or lessen famine, not to look rosy.

That's moving the goal post. Fully sufficient.

You can't just use percentages for this kind of thing.

Barring a very good cause that the vast majority of the population can get behind, there will be riots when the bananas and coffee disappear.

We grow enough in our garden that I could probably reach "100%" pretty easily if shit hit the fan, but I'm about tired of eating radish greens right now even that being related to a national crisis.

In the case of something like a world war, which is the type of scenario we're talking about here, I think people would begrudgingly accept that bananas and coffee are unavailable or very expensive.

People substitute very quickly and happily.

I remember food shortages during Covid. Nowhere near as bad as toilet paper shortages.

I can go without chocolate for a few days. Weeks, maybe. But if it becomes months, I get crabby.

I'll die before I go without my curvy yellow lumps of mush.

I've heard it usually takes at least an acre to grow enough food to feed a single family.

It depends a bit on your crop mix, yield, and of course, family size.

You'd be surprised how much some crops can yield in small areas. (Oh god, I used to actually like pickles before I realized how many cucumbers we were churning out last year.)

Where it gets space-intensive tend to be grain crops, which we don't currently grow because the ROI is so low, but have space to if life forced it on us. Protein can also be a little tricky depending on what your expectations are, but if you're okay with mostly beans and eggs, you'll be alright on well less than an acre for a small family.

Feeding a family on an acre is a bit like making pencils one at a time.

> Agricultural subsidies exist primarily due to lobbying,

That's mostly true, but it's also true that we don't want to starve. There are 330 million hungry mouths in the US and we've got to keep production way above that level or it becomes a big political problem real quick.

If we just let the market set prices, in years where farms are all producing bumper crops, oversupply would push profits way down. This would force many producers to sell their farms (most likely to corporate-scale farmers) and leave the sector. Subsidies keep a nonzero number of producers producing independently. Granted, the corporate-scale farmers (who also accumulate funds via subsidies) can buy out producers who want to sell, but with subsidies, more producers can afford to say no and stay independent.

You're moving the goalpost from "prevent starving" to "fully self-sustaining".

You don't need 99% variety of cuisine in case of a big war, you need calories. A lot of calories.

UPDATE: and BTW, if world population is growing (no global starvation), then it's clearly self-sustaining, no? So some countries must be self-sustaining just by math. At least one country must produce more than it consumes, otherwise, if everyone produced less, then we would have global starvation.

Even if one grants this, it does not make the case that any particular set of subsidies is justified by that reasoning.

You want to have stable food prices so people don't have to worry about basic survival.

Again, you can grant this and a huge number of agriculture subsidies still aren't justified.

People have an instinctive defensiveness over farms/farmers, but anyone who has studied farm subsidies in any depth knows there's no way to rationally justify huge swathes of them. I don't know anyone with the requisite knowledge who wouldn't agree with that including farmers and lobbyists (because they generally only like a subset of the subsidies themselves).

I’m from a historically agricultural state, and live in the farming area. Government interventions are regularly mocked - always have been.

Demand for food plummets when it is no longer fresh. Throwing food away is politically toxic. This creates major problems.

As people get richer they don’t want more food, they want better food. Fresher and more meat based. Which is fine. But means the food when you talk about food “that which prevents us from starving to death” you are quite divorced from actual demand.

People don’t price food based on its anti-starvation capabilities.

Either they follow traditional diets, or they buy for convenience (highly processed), or they are health nuts who live off rice, beans, and kale.

Nobody is trying to maximize calories. Very few people are trying to match their food intake to their amount physical exertion.

All these ontological and teleological models are divorced from how food is actually valued: market “taste” is insanely important under normal circumstances.

Our agriculture sector won’t succeed if it’s based around preventing famine.

Agree, subsidies should go only to calorie-rich foods that can lessen a widespread famine in case of big troubles. Not to the freshest cucumbers.

It is also the only alternative to a granary system to smooth out the variability of yields each year that might not average out for anything less than 10-15 year spans.

And the granary system regularly still resulted in shortages and famine. While crop subsidization has a bullet proof record of surplus.

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