It's a win-win.
Furthermore, we'd be putting our trust into the governments and politicians of foreign nations. And, quite honestly, despite all the shit we see about our politicians being corrupt, cheating on their wives, embezzling thousands of dollars a year, letting the rich get away with billions in tax loopholes, being stupid in congress, being radical not-born-in-murica communists, etc., at least keep in mind we at least see them in all their human imperfections (and sometimes less-than-human vices), whereas we have absolutely no idea what the hell goes on behind the closed doors and smokescreens at a foreign government. Politics and power is inherently a very difficult game of balancing flexible compromises and hardline stoicism, not a place for cults of personalities and naive idealism.
As for me, I'd much rather trust the politician who is getting publicly crucified for having told a racist joke 10 years ago, flirted a little too much with some girl not his wife, is a closest homosexual, tweeted something dumb like "#killasians lolwat", or committed some other sensationalist-media-breaking-news-but-realistically-inconsequential-to-his-character "sin" than the perfect politician who has never commit any sin and who no one dares to speak ill against (e.g. today's chairman Xi).
The idea that we need to protect strategic resources is outdated. We continue to do so, at our own detriment. Our sugar costs something like 5x what it costs in the rest of the world, because we place tariffs to keep it from coming in from the Caribbean. We are DESTROYING WEALTH CREATION with this market engineering. It is a tax that we see no benefit from and that is paid to no one.
Increased trade between countries increases stability. Some of my college classmates thought that we were due for a war with China just b/c they're the other huge power. What horseshit--- our mutual trade requires our politicians to play nice and not take any Crassian steps towards war.
If the US actually needed to make sure that we produced all of our strategic resources by ourselves then our economy would be tanked because we wouldn't be taking advantage of factories in BRIC. Do you think we make all the hard drives we would need to sustain a war against the rest of the world?
Not being able to produce enough wood tanked Soviet Union.
Yeah, so China has most rare earth metals. Are you advocating imperialism and occupation? Do we have evidence that they are managing their resource in an abusive way? (After a bit of reading, it appears that China does have large export restrictions. That market inefficiency is being solved by smuggling. :D http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_earth_industry_in_China#Hi... )
> By the time of the Soviet Union's collapse at the end of 1991, > nearly every kind of food was rationed. > Non-rationed foods and non-food consumer goods had virtually > disappeared from state owned stores.
Do you think that people were happy about this kind of situation?
China was not the only producer of rare earth metals but they used dumping and by that made production of rare earth metals unprofitable elsewhere. After other producers closed their plants, they started to heavily increase the rare earth metal prices.
"About 27 percent of the irrigated land in the United States overlies the aquifer, which yields about 30 percent of the ground water used for irrigation in the United States. Since 1950, agricultural irrigation has reduced the saturated volume of the aquifer by an estimated 9%. Depletion is accelerating, with 2% lost between 2001 and 2009 alone. Once depleted, the aquifer will take over 6,000 years to replenish naturally through rainfall."
2. Software / data and more modern approaches to agriculture can potentially optimize water usage.
3. startup / company opportunity here, if the policy makers can incentivize the agriculture industry to innovate instead of keeping the old inefficient ways.
In a real pinch the agricultural production dedicated to ethanol can be redirected to food, and perhaps most importantly even a small shift in the meat/plant balance towards plants creates a huge calorie surplus.
In short, food security looks more like a post hoc rationalization than a good justification for our terrible policy landscape when it comes to agriculture.
American culture can replace it with wheat, yes, but if you ever want a case study on government fiddling with a crop for national security reasons, rice is it. Not in the US, but Asia? It's probably on par with oil.
http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/can-we-feed-our-world-without-mon...
They do spend millions of dollars lobbying the government every year.
https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00000005...
Soy seems to be in a similar situation to corn.
Not that I don't think the sugar subsidies specifically are nonsense, the structural reasons that food subsidies exist is sound.
Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that the human population is far too large and puts far too many demands and strains on nature for anything like sustainability.
So, someone may bring up large scale hydroponics, especially of genetically modified produce, but that is really just another can being kicked down the road, because no matter how many tricks you come up with and how hard you push the pendulum, it will eventually come swinging back with a vengeance, especially the farther it is pushed out of its range.
Agreed, definitely a thorny issue, and there probably isn't a simple fix. And even if the fix were as simple as "cut off subsidies for water-intensive crops", that would itself be hard in today's political climate.
> no matter how many tricks you come up with and how hard you push the pendulum, it will eventually come swinging back with a vengeance, especially the farther it is pushed out of its range.
Source? Human population is supposed to top out around 10-12B, last I checked, and then level out or even drop off a little bit. In a pinch, modern agriculture could probably feed that many, just with today's methods, but that would mean less in the way of meat and resource-intensive foods like almonds.
There are resource scarcities (e.g. oil, fresh water), but food is not really one of them.
I apologize if I appeared to be simplifying the issue. That was not my intent and is not the limit of my understanding (though I am certainly no expert, either). But climate is a major limiting factor for other states, even before we get into the nittier grittier details of soil composition and fertility, topography, preexisting transportation infrastructure, and so forth. Totally agree with you that there are a lot more complications and issues involved than just climate, and again, very sorry if I gave the impression otherwise.
The fact is even in developing countries -- when women are educated and have access to contraception -- most families have 2 children. This is now becoming a reality, even in developing countries like Bangladesh the fertility rate is something like 2.2. Only Africa has higher fertility rates.
The real problems are with resources, like water, food and energy. When the developing countries become developed, and everyone has a washing machine and fridge, that's when the fun starts.
1. Destroying the farming industry 2. Destroying the land entirely, and then destroying the farming industry.
The current situation is proof that the current level of agriculture is unsubstainable.
As a reference, a few quick searches[1] show that it takes:
5.4 gallons of water to grow a single head of broccoli
4.9 gallons of water to grow a single walnut
1.1 gallons of water to grow a single almond
[1] http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/02/wheres-califo...
802.7 gallons of water for one pound of beef
187.969 gallons of water for one pound of vegetables
Agriculture consumes 2/3rds of California's water, most of which goes to growing and feeding farmed animals.
Source: http://www.waterfootprint.org/?page=cal/WaterFootprintCalcul... (Used United States for country)
http://www.waterfootprint.org/?page=files/Animal-products
shows 10.19 litres/calorie beef vs 1.34 liters/calorie vegetables. Which is an even greater distance than the gallons per pound I mentioned. This obvioulsy can't be right. I will argue that theory wise it makes sense that a plant based diet would use less than a diet consisting of eating animals that ate the plant based diet. The animals are expending energy! You could argue that we can feed animals lower water usage plants than we can feed humans, but does that really make a healthy animal for human consumption?
That said, there are other negatives associated with beef production and consumption :).
Also - not all calories are created equal.
What if meat is imported from areas/states/countries where there is no water problem.
And with that, maybe California should open itself to import vegetables/fruits from other states, countries too?
It often is.
> And with that, maybe California should open itself to import vegetables/fruits from other states, countries too?
California imports fruits and vegetables from other states and countries already.
90% Lean Beef: 798 calories per pound
80% Lean Beef: 1152 calories per pound
Carrots: 186 calories per pound
Potatoes: 354 calories per pound
Using GP's numbers for gallons/pound:
90% Lean Beef: .994 calories per gallon
80% Lean Beef: 1.435 calories per gallon
Carrots: .990 calories per gallon
Potatoes: 1.883 calories per gallon
Much closer than I was expecting. I was also not expecting numbers on the order of magnitude of one calorie per gallon...
Soybeans have about 2000 calories / lb, based on the number Google gives me of 446 calories / 100g. A random website claims soybeans take 200 gallons of water to produce 1 lb, which comes out to about 10 calories / gallon.
That said, you can make huge gains just by switching from beef to pork or chicken. Pork uses about half the resources of beef, per pound, and chicken about a third. Eat your beefs for special occasions, eat chicken and pork if you want every-day meats.
Cattle can be grown lots of places.
Those crops are going to have to come from somewhere else pretty soon regardless.
The US will never need to rely on other nations for their corn, rice, wheat, apples, barley, etc. But if the choice is between destroying our own land and infrastructure or relying on other countries for our kiwis, artichokes, avocados and almonds, then I might actually be okay with eating Mexican avocados (and I think the Mexican farmers might appreciate that too).