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Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

Argentina seems like a counterexample here: the Pampas are one of the world's major temperate agricultural regions.

Argentina's arable land is just 27% of what the USA has. Fact-checking myself... the USA has more arable land than Canada, Australia and Argentina combined. Russia has a lot, but the USA has the most. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_arable_la...

Not sure where to find an aggregate growing days figure, but there's clearly less of them per arable surface area in Canada compared to the USA.

The thread was about climate. US is 3.5x greater than Argentina.

Not per capita. Look, Japan (and S Korea, Taiwan, Switzerland, etc) have shit for natural resources yet they are not technologically retarded. They have a highly advanced economies and societies.

This is drifting from the point. The thread was about the share of territory with optimal farming climate, not per-capita anything, and not whether resource-poor countries can be advanced.

Not strictly about climate, also about surface area in optimal climate.

Honestly if other countries did the same stuff as Argentina they'd probably be way worse off than Argentina as the country is still relatively wealthy. They were arguably too rich (and not populated enough with 4 million people in 1900) for a while making industry, especially export oriented industry, less viable sort of like dutch disease.

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