Comment by crote
1 day ago
Name one country which is fully self-sustaining.
Agricultural subsidies exist primarily due to lobbying, the "we don't want to starve" argument is nothing more than an excuse used to justify the fortunes handed out to corporate-scale farmers.
France, USA, Australia to name 3 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_food_self...).
You can't just use percentages for this kind of thing.
Barring a very good cause that the vast majority of the population can get behind, there will be riots when the bananas and coffee disappear.
We grow enough in our garden that I could probably reach "100%" pretty easily if shit hit the fan, but I'm about tired of eating radish greens right now even that being related to a national crisis.
In the case of something like a world war, which is the type of scenario we're talking about here, I think people would begrudgingly accept that bananas and coffee are unavailable or very expensive.
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I've heard it usually takes at least an acre to grow enough food to feed a single family.
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1. That's almost 20 years old data. 2. That's just calories.
Here's more recent data: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-025-01173-4
Appears to me, like neither country is fully self-sufficient.
Your link is about a healthy diet, not surviving. Agricultural subsidies are to avoid or lessen famine, not to look rosy.
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> Agricultural subsidies exist primarily due to lobbying,
That's mostly true, but it's also true that we don't want to starve. There are 330 million hungry mouths in the US and we've got to keep production way above that level or it becomes a big political problem real quick.
If we just let the market set prices, in years where farms are all producing bumper crops, oversupply would push profits way down. This would force many producers to sell their farms (most likely to corporate-scale farmers) and leave the sector. Subsidies keep a nonzero number of producers producing independently. Granted, the corporate-scale farmers (who also accumulate funds via subsidies) can buy out producers who want to sell, but with subsidies, more producers can afford to say no and stay independent.
You're moving the goalpost from "prevent starving" to "fully self-sustaining".
You don't need 99% variety of cuisine in case of a big war, you need calories. A lot of calories.
UPDATE: and BTW, if world population is growing (no global starvation), then it's clearly self-sustaining, no? So some countries must be self-sustaining just by math. At least one country must produce more than it consumes, otherwise, if everyone produced less, then we would have global starvation.