Comment on That's how the world works.
azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 6 hours agoGardening and foraging won’t get you anywhere if you live in an urban area. You need an absurd amount of arable land per capita if you want to survive. A vegetable garden is useful in times of war not for raw calorie input but for supplements (either for specific nutrients not commonly found in rationed food supply or for taste).
The good news is that food production is a “solved” issue. Any industrialized country is capable of producing enough calories to feed itself and then some, even without gas imports. Worst case you just stop growing bioethanol and beef to double the amount of available arable land at no tangible human cost.
Those who’ll get fucked by Trump’s war are not Americans or Europeans, it’ll be poor economies that can barely support industrial agriculture in the best of times. Their ability to buy fertilizer is very price-sensitive, which we already saw in 2022, though at the time the US had leadership willing to intercede and guarantee grain shipments.
This time, millions will die, but not in a prepper fantasy kind of way, but in a “they live in a ‘shithole country’ and we won’t care to help because our money finances ICE and bribes now” kind of way.
dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 hours ago
I think this somewhat ignores the way markets kill people during times of famine - see the Late Victorian Holocausts or the Great Famine, in both of which there was plenty of food available, but the problem was the introduction of markets and artificial austerity measures that failed to distribute food to people dying of famine
so, food production might be a solved issue (I think that’s a bit more debatable given soil degradation and the threats to supply chains necessary for the industrial inputs needed to keep those food production systems going in their current, post-Green-Revolution format), but the distribution issue has not been solved and will likely result in many of us dying due to lack of economic power to afford food that will simply expire and rot in storage and then be destroyed and disposed of in a way that denies us access to the waste
azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 5 hours ago
Both your examples are pre Haber-Bosch. Not that it entirely invalidates your point, but daily calorie consumption for a Westerner is orders of magnitude cheaper than it was for a Victorian coal miner. In fact what we generally struggle with nowadays in rich countries is an overabundance of (poor quality) food.
It’s not out of the question for poor people to lack calories in rich countries, but that’s a monumental policy failure. And critically it happens to socioeconomic classes that have neither the time nor the land area to dedicate to things like doomsday prepping (i.e. poor and marginalized communities in urban areas). The only solution to food insecurity is social programs, not doomsday prepping or grain hoarding.
dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 hours ago
there was still storage of foods in both cases and both the Great Famine and Late Victorian Holocausts were cases where markets and false austerity led to normal food distribution systems during times of famine not happening, and then lots of deaths occurring
my point is that food production is a separate concern from food distribution - they’re related, and to your point over-production can reduce prices and make distribution more accessible, but when production occasionally fails, it is the economic system that starves people first (not the lack of food)
this is different than in pre-capitalist societies when usually during times when food production failed, stocks of food were released and distribution was ensured in ways that marketized & capitalist societies have not done (where for example in Syria around the time of the Arab Spring, we saw grocers dying from starvation because they couldn’t make enough money selling food to afford to buy food for themselves).
And yes, starvation when food is abundant is a monumental policy failure - this is something we should be driving home more to people, that the US chooses to have starving and homeless people as a policy choice.
Completely agreed that social solutions are the only way to solve food insecurity, individual action like doomsday prepping is a distraction that primes us to victim-blame people who die for not “preparing” adequately.