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We Should Celebrate Agriculture, Not Constrain It
In the last few weeks politicians have been making much noise about constraining agriculture in the name of emissions reduction or climate control or some such nonsense.
No.
We should be celebrating agriculture as we have reached (or at least are very close to) for the first time in human history the point that no one on the planet needs to starve to death due to a lack of food. Humans have sought that goal for millennia. It has been the stated goal of beauty pageant contestants for decades. Yet now that we have achieved (or at least are close to achieving) that goal, politicians, leaders, our elite, and others NOW want to put limits on the mechanisms that got us here?
I recognize that there remain some transportation and distribution challenges to getting all the food the world’s farmers produce to all the people who need it, but my unscientific observation is that overall we are growing enough food to feed the entire world population. When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, the widespread concern was that the world’s population was growing faster than the world’s food production. But, due to improved farming efficiencies mostly in the United States and in Europe, those trends have switched. American and European farmers have solved world hunger! Despite setbacks such as the former Rhodesia (breadbasket of Africa) becoming Zimbabwe (the basket case of Africa), farmers have stepped up their game. We should be celebrating.
In the last couple of years, I have been fascinated with some of the (mostly United States) farming channels on YouTube. The efficiencies those farmers seek, and how much they produce using relatively few people is impressive. But that productivity takes capital expenditures (million dollar pieces of farm equipment!), specialty seeds and fertilizers (50 lb. bags of seed for $7,000!), and fuel (mostly diesel and natural gas) (125 gallons of diesel ($500 – 600!) for a day or two’s work from many tractors and other pieces of equipment!). Yet because of that diesel fuel usage, our “betters” do not want to celebrate. They want to constrain the very mechanism that has been so successful at feeding the world. This makes no sense.
Here we have achieved the goal of producing enough food in the world that no one need go hungry (or at least are coming very close). Yet our politicians and other elites want to get in the way. No!
Let’s celebrate that world hunger is or will soon be a thing of the past.
Published in Environment
If they’ve “lost” their crisis, they’re always happy to manufacture a new one. That loss makes them miserable!
Great point; yours and the OP. I’ll re-phrase a bit with a prediction:
World hunger will return — Progressives need the problem more than they need a solution.
IMHO that in modern times, famines and food scarcity are more often the result of government policies rather than natural disasters such as droughts, floods, or pestilence.
Our politicians and elites are evil . Prove me wrong ?
Thanks for this. I haven’t heard a Paul Harvey recording in decades.
And also the result of the political corruption that enables TPTB to control whether and where the foodstuffs will go, especially in the poorer nations.
Certainly. What a voice. Vin Skully is another great voice we lost this week. Great men.
And never forget what eco-warrior Pol Pot did for green farming and agriculture in Cambodia.
My hero, Rush Limbaugh, used to say that the Left always needs an underclass, which is why blacks never seem to be able to improve their lives. Now, the worldwide Elite Left is having to manufacture a new underclass, to replace those that are leaving.
I read somewhere years ago that hunger was caused by Mother Nature; starvation by government.
This discussion between Jordan Peterson and Michael Yon is hair-raising. I think there are dark days ahead.
Government knows if it has total control over the food supply, it has total control over its citizens . . .
Grow Baby Grow! (As in “Drill Baby Drill”)
Remember when the liberals talked about being pro-farmer? Remember when Democrats loved the small farmer?
The good ole’ days.
Outstanding. Everyone should listen to this. Both guys are on top of the global situation.
Our current crop of elites (USA and the rest of the West) are the worst we’ve ever had. They’re both ungrateful for how we got where we’re at and exceedingly arrogant to boot. Remember a few years ago when Mike Bloomberg explained how easy farming is? Per Bloomberg;
“The agrarian society lasted 3,000 years and we could teach processes. I could teach anybody, even people in this room, no offense intended, to be a farmer,” Bloomberg said. “It’s a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn. You could learn that. Then we had 300 years of the industrial society. You put the piece of metal on the lathe, you turn the crank in the direction of the arrow and you can have a job. And we created a lot of jobs. At one point, 98 percent of the world worked in agriculture, now it’s 2 percent in the United States.”
Michael Bloomberg Agriculture Expert
This is what one needs to realize about the Left and Democrats in general about all issues. They don’t really want to solve any problems. They want the issues. If a problem is solved, what would they campaign on/fund raise on? That’s what they hate about Trump. He came in intending to actually solve problems. That’s not how the Swamp works. You saw that early on in his administration when he offered to solve the DACA problem in exchange for the wall. They said no.
Mr. Bloomberg’s statement ranks as one of the most uninformed statements ever made by an apparently successful politician or businessperson. If farmers were still simply putting seed in hole, add dirt and water, we’d still be on subsistence farming in which as you say, the vast majority of us would still be spending most of our time in producing barely enough food to survive. And lots of people in many parts of the world would be starving to death.
It is human nature to believe that we know enough about occupations to impose regulations on them, even if we have never spent one day working in said occupation. It’s not just politicians, it’s everybody. The entire world could use a good dose of Mind Your Own Business.
According to Glen Beck, this latest version of the Biden tax and spend bill that seems ready to pass actually earmarks billions for paying farmers NOT TO PRODUCE. I don’t know whether he really had time to find that in the 750 pages of it, or some whistle blower passed it on.
Bloomberg – the cauliflower of mayors . . .
It is truly outstanding.
There are a couple of things that stick out for me from this. One is that Yon repeatedly points the WEF and makes a good case for their deliberate malevolence; for example, (1) if the world needs lower nitrogen emissions and also food, and the Dutch are superefficient and super clean about it (being the world’s #2 food exporter) why don’t they shut down farming in low-efficiency polluting third world countries that don’t produce nearly as much food, and export Dutch food world-wide?; and (2) the war between Ukraine and Russia just coincidentally happens to involve two of the world’s largest exporters of food and fertilizer, further shutting down the world’s food production.
(And I’ll add that hours after Putin signed an agreement with Ukraine to allow Ukrainian export of grain, two out of four missiles of unknown origin successfully hit the port in Odessa, thereby limiting or curtailing Ukraine’s ability to export the grain that Putin had just allowed.)
Also Yon said that reducing farm and food production is deliberate and wide-spread. And there are three things that always happen together and cause each other, and that cyclically reinforce one another to create a greater and great in effect: war, famine, and pandemics. Any one of these, especially when large and taking place in non-resilient countries, causes the other two. He also said that he expects very roughly 1.6 Billion dead by starvation by 2025 or so.
Thanks for the summary @flicker. It’s hard to imagine any circumstances where the reduction in food production is not deliberate. It seems to me that even if everyone came to their senses and stopped the destructive policies today, it’s still too late.
Odd. The 1.6 Billion dead by 2025 prediction is 18% of the world population. The exact number of people wiped out by a virus in the fictional series Counterpart. (Don’t ask me why I remember that. Interesting show BTW)
You’re welcome, though it’s not really a summary, they covered a lot. And I was only mentioning just a couple things that I was still thinking about the next day. Interestingly, Peterson said he feared that 150 million would die, and Yon kept saying he thought Peterson was being waaay too optimistic. Yon also pointed out that much of the world’s population is financially marginal, and any world-wide inflation would kill the poor first — and most of the world is poor. And the first thing governments do during a famine is to commandeer all the food, which leaves the farmers going out of business or bankrupt and they don’t have the money or the materiel to plant the next season, so they stop farming, which increases the famine.
Another thing. Regarding conspiracy theories, Yon said that there’s no theory, the WEF is doing all this out in the open, and has been publishing their plans for years. There’s no theory involved. They’re simply doing what they said they’ll do.
And another thing. Peterson asked if Yon thought this was all just a coincidental collision of incompetencies or planned starvation, Yon said that for such plans a shutting down the Netherlands’ farm production, the simplest reasoning doesn’t apply. He said, for example, will the WEF plan to make up for Holland by having India grow less food, less efficiently and with more pollution? No, nobody’s that stupid. Pollution is just a pretext.
(Come to think of it, it’s as stupid as reducing US greenhouse emissions by stopping producing gas and oil, and then begging other counties to produce the very same amounts of gas and oil for the US to burn and produce the same greenhouse gasses. It’s too unreasonable to fall under the label of well-intended incompetence. It, too, is just a pretext.)
Anyway, it was a pretty darned good review of the state of the world and an indication what’s very likely coming.