>and the alternative? Milking polar bears?
Understanding Ricardian/comparative advantage, recognising that dairy is not a matter of national security, and importing it.
Understanding Ricardian/comparative advantage, recognising that dairy is not a matter of national security, and importing it.
Perfect timing, as Norway is currently gearing up for the celebration of 200 years since the Norwegian constitution.... which was preceded by years of famine due to a British naval blockade (Norway was dragged into the Napoleonic wars due to Denmark, so the British blockaded our ports for 5 years)
It is something that is well remembered, in particularly thanks to the poem Terje Vigen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terje_Vigen) by Henrik Ibsen, about a man who tried to run the blockade in a rowboat to smuggle food for his starving family from Denmark, only to be imprisoned by the British and upon his release in 1814 finding his family had died.
It's a poem that is central to teaching of Norwegian literature in schools, and also often brought up in history classes, including in primary school.
A country can do without uranium, it can't do without dairy. As another example of food security being a matter of national security - look what happened to Egypt 2+ years ago once wheat prices rose - for years before that Egypt was geared ("international specialization") toward fruits/strawberries/etc... production for export while becoming world's biggest wheat importer.
I lived through food/gas shortages and high prices at the end of USSR so i think i know how Egypt people felt. Now living in the US i appreciate the US disregard for international free trade agreements when it comes to food and gas - i.e. farmers subsidies and prohibition for oil export - thus making sure that shortages and high-prices of 197x have much less chances of happening again. Free trade is a great idea, yet it works only when implemented by all participants to the same extent and it just doesn't make any sense when implemented unilaterally (or by minor number of participants and/or to different degree).
Don't buy into the free market propaganda too much. The biggest proponents of free market propaganda (I am looking at the EU and the US) have programs that explicitly target food security. Neither would hesitate to introduce export controls to prevent famine-induced revolts.
In Egypt the cost of weat increased toghether with the price of all other grains. And people need grains (but not weat), so they revolted.
Also, what their agriculture changed for is not very relevant, the root of the problem is that their agriculture does not produce enough value for direct consuption or exchange into food (what made their money worth less, and imported food expensive). Growing fruits probably helped reduce the problem.
To be able to give them meaningful advice to do things differently (like, for example, importing), one has to show an example of a country which does things differently (and at least as successful in achieving the goal as Norway).
Apparently the Japanese consume 76.45 kg milk per year per person (as of 2007), while Norwegians consume 261.52 kg. Yet the Japanese have no problem living healthy, long lives.
South Korea gets by merrily with just 26.9 kg, roughly half of Palestine (49.17 kg). (Sure, our country has lots of social/health problems, but "not enough milk" is not one of them.)
"Where the C allele indicated lactase non-persistence and the T allele indicated lactase persistence, the study found that women that were homozygous for the C allele exhibited worse health than women with a C and a T allele and women with two T alleles. Women who were CC reported more hip and wrist fractures, more osteoporosis, and more cataracts than the other groups.[13] They also were on average 4–6 mm shorter than the other women, as well as slightly lighter in weight"
For colder, European climate, bigger weight/size is preferable (and bigger body requires stronger bones). Not so for warmer/Asian areas where smaller body size is ok and thus more favorable, in particular because it requires less animal protein, etc... which is less available there than in Europe.
Besides, descendants of Scandinavian immigrants have no problem living quite comfortably in, say, Brazil. The genetic difference between different peoples is not large enough to justify treating milk as essential for some group of people but not for others. It's just a convenient and relatively cheap source of nutrition, that's all.
No kidding. Oslo, annual average, 6.5C, Beijing : 12.5C. That's 59 latitude vs. 39, different Sun angle, longer days, etc... you know. And, btw, northern Chinese noticeably taller than south.
>The genetic difference between different peoples is not large enough to justify treating milk as essential for some group of people but not for others.
the study mentioned above explicitly describes the results of consuming milk vs. not consuming due to genetic difference. To me the difference is essential (grew in Russia). As result of evolution in Norway and overall Europe, people there also treat milk as essential.
A world that relies on trade is a world at peace.
it is a stretch. Free trade just isn't always the best approach to every situation.
>A world that relies on trade is a world at peace.
again, big stretch. Just for example:
http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21578978-world-...
"Rather, the world of 1913 was quite like that of 2013: modern, substantially urbanised and, even as Woodrow Wilson set about slashing import tariffs, thriving on global trade. "
Good point - people were in fact using the argument that the extent of international trade made large wars between powers like Germany and the UK unlikely...
Colonialism was driven by a lust for trade, so that's hardly a truism.
Look outside Europe. Dairy consumption is not even the global norm.
"A country can do without uranium, it can't do without staple food".
shortage of staple food will cause price spike with related economical/political/social effects. Staple food isn't just a whimsical choice of consumer. Beside some exceptions (where people moved and brought their tradition with them), a staple food is a result of hundreds or thousands of years of evolutionary optimization for that population in that region. Milk in Europe is exactly such a case, and is a very important one to the population there. (see my other post in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7034795). Specifically, in case of milk in Norway any issues with its availability, in addition to short term price-spike related effects, would in long term affect negatively health and well being of children whose body/skeleton would be forming at the time.
However, my other point, that Norway can easily import 100% of its food demand (see "if Norway entirely stopped producing food, it would still eat just fine"), stands.
The issue is what if we can't. As I've pointed out elsewhere in this thread, this has happened - the most well known instance being the British 5 year naval blockade during the Napoleonic wars, which caused years of famine, and death.
And because of Norway's extremely strategic position, with a long coast line and many defensible ports if you have naval superiority, coupled with huge oil industry, and a position to lock the Russian Northern fleet out of the Atlantic, any defence planning for Norway is going to assume that in the case of another war, Norway will either be occupied or attempted blockaded or both.
Then the situation changes. Norway has very little arable land due to the mountains, so it is not a given that taking the dairy away would leave us with sufficient food in the case of a blockade. Certainly during the British blockade we did not have enough food to sustain a much smaller population.
Is that wrong?
the cows (and other grazing animals in their group) evolved very special stomach to consume the grass (parts of grasses) which aren't consumable by predators like humans.
The comparison of consuming human-edible plants (or their parts) directly vs. feeding it to cows is rooted in industrialized beef production where corn is fed to cows. Such wasteful conversion of human edible food into more tastier/pricier human edible food allows for higher revenue and larder total profits - people will eat the same calories, beef is just more expensive packaging of it and thus generates more total revenue and profit in the societies which can afford it and want it.
>I'd still expect grain to be even easier to get -- animals are something of a luxury item
In normal situation, cows milk is a source of calories _additional_ to the grain as cows are fed on grasses grown where grain cultivation doesn't make much sense - short summer, not plain land, etc... They also fed on [minimally processed - fermented in big piles] wheat stems after grain is extracted. The cows feed today also includes processed waste from other areas of food industry - the quality of this stuff varies greatly from country to country depending on regulations and industry and society mentality about it.
It very much is considered a vital part of diet in Norway, though, to the point where you'd pretty much be considered to be abusing your children if you don't ensure they drink lots of milk. While we certainly could survive without it, any politicians suggesting to Norwegians we should do without milk would find themselves out of a political career.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/world/july-dec11/egyptfood_11...