World Per Capita Food Production, 1961-2005
We’re making more food per-capita in the world today than we ever have.
Firstly let me apologise for my extremely long previous post.
It seems you are correct, globally we are producing more food than ever, but if you follow the links to this document you can see that the trend is not evenly distributed across the globe.
For example in the UK our food production has dropped from 107% per capita in 1983 to around 96% in 2003. We are a net importer (~2% of cereals) as are many other European countries. Even the US does not seem to produce 100% of the food it needs, although you are a net exporter of cereals. Assuming I’m reading this document correctly.
Why is that relevant? Hong Kong makes very little of the food it consumes. Is that a bad thing?
It seems like a bad thing to me. The more dependent we are on others for food, energy etc the more likely it will be that a single disaster will affect us all.
See this article at New Scientist. , sorry if you’re not s subscriber it may be difficult to read the whole article. If you have an Athens account you will be able to read it.
We’ve already seen examples of holding countries to hostage over energy, with the recent situation between Russia and the Ukraine.
Do you think it will be any different with food?
I thought this was an interesting suggestion. Politicians could certainly do with being more concerned with the ‘long-term’ in their decision-making processes.
Well, it never was, was it? I didn’t produce very much food last year. Some people are farmers and some aren’t. It doesn’t strike me as being a necessarily rational assumption to make that food production and consumption should be equal within arbitrary political borders.
My point is that because production is not even there are places that do not get enough food, it doesn’t matter if we produce 10 times the amount of food needed globally if it doesn’t get where it’s needed.
Plus like I said earlier, if you rely on imports for food, energy or water you can be held hostage by your supplier.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t import at all, particularly in the UK where our climate does not allow us to grow certain crops or fruit, but we should at least be self sufficient in basic foodstuffs (grain etc), water and energy. At the moment we are buying some of our natural gas supplies from abroad as our own supplies run low this will only get worse. Prices of natural gas have already increased massively and the average annual bill is heading towards £1000 pa according to one newspaper.
Then the UK is a very poor example, since starvation’s not terribly common there.
Distribution of food is a very distinct problem from a shortage of food. I heartily agree that the former is a problem, but the latter, it would seem, is not. Food distribution problems are largely political in nature, not a result of resource shortages, and have political solutions.
I simply don’t agree. And the UK’s a perfect example, because twice they’ve faced a problem regarding this; the two U-boat campaigns. In both cases the U-boat campaign failed in large part because it was easy for the UK to simply put more land to use and ration in the meantime. German U-boat war planning (especially in the first war) was in part erroneously based on projections of existing British food production, and largely failed to account for the effect of a shift in land usage that resulted from the pressure of submarine warfare. The airplanes and destroyers that sank all the U-boats get all the press, but largely forgotten is that with respect to foodstuffs, the British just put more land into use to make up shortages.
There’s something to be said for holding the strategic cards when it comes to any given resource, but the inescapable fact is that you’re often better off buying something rather than making it yourself. If you look at the last century of history, British resource security has largely been achieved not by becoming insular or making everything themselves, but by participating in the political semi-unification of continental Europe. The threats to British resource base were all political (war with Germany, to be specific) and the most effective solution has been the European Union, a political solution.
No matter how much food we grow, if we’re intent on killing each other, people are going to starve. The ugly fact is that famines are remarkably easy to correlate with civil wars, full scale wars, evil dictatorships, and the like. You can have a famine even in a self-sufficient food producer if the government, or prospective government, wants one. The first solution to hunger, and for that matter ALL our problems, is peace. All other problems will continue, irrespective of anything else, as long as we have an international system that leads to real and apprehended war.
I’m repeating what my dad said based on his experience as a CEO of a publicly traded company. Certainly I’m giving a worst case description, but it is something that he and other CEOs have remarked as being a rather stressful part of their job in having to always be dealing with the current quarter, and not being able to adequately plan for three or five year (if not longer scale) aims.
“Stupid” isn’t the best word, admittedly. But the point is that they are a) unaware of all of the possibilities that the company has except for those which are publicly proposed by the CEO, and b) when looking at those proposals consider them principally in terms of short scale gains, which c) leads to the CEO generally proposing short-term plans.
Japanese companies are significantly less beholden to their stock holders, and are more competitive with one another. During the 70s, the Big Three were essentially acting as a sort of unofficial monopoly.
You might want to look up “Honda Civic.” People want a “deal” which is a bit more complex to define than “cheapest”, but amounts to the same thing. When they buy a car, it’s going to be the cheapest they can get with all the stuff they want in it–including looks, lasting life, and coolness factor. A Yugo might have a cheap price, but isn’t a good deal compared to other cars in a close enough price range.
But that still ultimately comes down to which company can provide all the same features for the lowest cost. Yugo didn’t manage that, Honda Civic did.
(And yes, customers with more money to spend will look for something with more/better features, but they’re still shopping for the cheapest “deal” that satisfies what they are looking for.)
I didn’t say junk, I said “corner cutting.” In engineering, the simplest solution is often the best one. It’s the path that cuts all the corners to get the desired result for the least effort. In some cases, this might be something of a poor overall answer, in majority it isn’t. The problem is that, in the case where it is a rather bad solution, as soon as one guy goes ahead and does it, everyone else is obligated to follow in as well.
Look at Hollywood. It’s easier to get customers to come to a known quantity. Hence, if you can buy the rights to something popular like Harry Potter or Batman or whatever, you’ve already got a minimum guaranteed audience regardless of the end result. If a movie succeeds, again, you’re better to continue to make sequels until you’ve milked it for everything it’s got because people are going to come with the hopes that it will live up to the predecessor.
Look at all of the directors who are of foreign nationality. If anyone makes popular movies internationally, Hollywood will pay them to come to the US and make movies because it’s easier to hire people who make top sellers on their own than to test out unknowns locally. Same thing with actors. Australians and Brits are significantly overrepresented among the Hollywood roster.
Any studio that tried to do things the “right way” and create interesting and novel films, giving new directors free reign to try new things and lead the way to significant advances in storytelling and technique, is going to fail compared to those who take the easy path to money.
In the software industry, consider Microsoft. They have little to no particular reason to innovate. Almost always, another company comes up with something interesting and novel, and as it looks like it will succeed, MS does their own version and makes it already available as part of the OS, killing the competition.
Say the name of any industry, and I’ll gladly tell you what corners were cut by the guys at the top of the heap to get there. My dad found the book Soap Opera to be relatively humorous in deriding such tales as one of the R&D guys discovering a method of making a soap bar that forms more foam (which they knew was a primary thing housewives looked for in their soap) and floats in water but only lasts half as long before the customer has to buy a new one (oh noes!!) and those evil company executives thought that this was just wonderful all around (and proceeded to make a fortune off of it.)
I said that this would be the solution–as in, in theory. But not believing it to be an ideal world, I’d be hesitant to propose it minus evidence to the contrary.
Overall I don’t think you’ve said much different from me, we’re just quibbling over my tendency to use less specific words like “stupid” instead of “out of the loop and focussed on short term profits” and “cheap” instead of “a good deal.” But feel free to disagree with that appraisal.