Comment by ben_w
20 hours ago
Many farmers are subsidised specifically so that food is over-produced in most years, specifically to ensure than in bad years people don't go hungry.
Corporations may indeed be taking advantage of this, demanding prices so low that the farmers don't get the benefit of those subsidies. However:
> buy the stuff and sell it at a premium later
Is the point of a futures market. Futures let people trade a thing before they even know how supply and demand will balance, guaranteeing a price for the producer and letting them plan purchases of machinery and maintenance, with the risks (in bad years) and profit margins (in good years) going up the supply chain.
No, the point of a futures market is to have a reliable supply which matches demand and allows everyone who works to produce and use a given commodity to have a reasonable expectation of demand and how production should be matched to it.
Goldman-Sachs should _not_ be inserting themselves into profiting on the poor's daily bread.
https://theecologist.org/2011/sep/13/how-goldman-sachs-start...
The point of the futures market is to transfer risk to someone more capable or more willing to manage it. Any effect on supply and demand is a side-effect of this.
The risk is inherent. Not everyone that produces a commodity wants to manage the risk associated with that commodity, as it is a very different skill set.
A "reliable supply" is fundamentally not possible with all the vagaries of the natural world. Even the Code of Hammurabi makes reference to this*, and we still have "acts of god" in modern parlance.
Futures significantly pre-date your link.
* https://ehammurabi.org/law/48
We've made a couple advances in food production, storage, and distribution in the decades since Hammurabi last walked the earth.
How come acts of god only seem to ever benefit insurance corporations and never individual humans?
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"as reliable a supply as weather and other unforeseen circumstances and human efforts spread across as wide an area as is possible"
the point of a system is what it does. if the futures market lets a bank make money off bread, thats the point of it
That was certainly not the intention nor goal of the folks who first set up a futures market for flour in Chicago at the beginning of the previous century.
Another reason why most countries subsidise their agriculture is because in times of war you don't want your enemy to starve you. That's mostly about high calories foods, not fancy salads though.
It would be just easier to not wage war by the way.
Can't think of many countries besides Canada and US that would not starve in NATO if such a necessity arose, and that's because they produce lots of cereals.
All the other countries in NATO are major food importers.
>All the other countries in NATO are major food importers.
All apart from France, Netherlands, Spain, Denmark, Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Turkey, Italy and Ireland.
Interestingly the US is borderline now depending on how you measure food imports and exports.
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And the best way to ensure that no one attacks you it is to make strong army and economy.
Being a major importers of olive oil is probably not such a big deal. The EU is pretty self-sufficient for food, for example - can change a bit the food and agg mix if needed (and some countries have emergency stores as well).
> It would be just easier to not wage war by the way.
Wars do not start by mutual agreement of all belligerents. If anything, usually the opposite.
> It would be just easier to not wage war by the way
Yeah, those pesky Ukrainians waging war for the pleasure of it.
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In the US, we have a massive grainfed meat livestock sector that in an emergency could basically all be slaughtered in favor of feeding the grain to people.
But we also have recent history demonstrating that this will not be allowed to happen, no matter how much starvation there is in poorer countries, we WILL have our steaks. Not negotiable.
> But we also have recent history demonstrating that this will not be allowed to happen, no matter how much starvation there is in poorer countries, we WILL have our steaks. Not negotiable.
Indeed, though given Trump's behaviour I have wondered what will happen when it's poorer *US states*.
Fortunately, the farmers had a word and seem to have stopped the deportation of the undocumented (illegal) immigrants who do so much farm work.
Also fortunately, the reservoirs (that weren't even connected to where the fires in SoCal were) were not actually emptied, so my worst-case scenario at the time didn't come up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_water_release_from_Lake_K...
Long may it continue that people who can say no to bad decisions, remain able to say no. Last thing anyone in the world needs with the Eurasian breadbaskets of Ukraine and Russia destroying each other's grain export capacity is the US shooting itself in both legs with an M134.
Anyone who is actually wondering hasn’t been paying attention.
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rich americans will have their steaks.
poor americans will starve outside the walls
I come from a lower class US background.
I assure you, take one look at us and you’ll instantly see that very few of us are in any danger of starving.
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Distribution is hard too. It’s not as simple as “we have food and we are mean”. Look at how Hamas for example was seizing food supplies meant for starving Palestinians. Who is going to deliver food aid to, idk, Sudan and ensure only the hungry get it? What guns and soldiers will protect it? Who is going to pay for it?
Other countries have a lot of money and excess food too - EU, China, Brazil. I would look forward to hearing their proposals to solve hunger and to shake the hands of each volunteer and soldier and pilot/ship captain going to help feed people.
> Who is going to deliver food aid to, idk, Sudan and ensure only the hungry get it?
I assume this is why in really dire circumstances with unsecured territory you airdrop stuff (at the risk of crushing a few people).
At least then the people nearest get a chance at grabbing it first.
> Look at how Hamas for example was seizing food supplies meant for starving Palestinians.
Or look at how the IDF had to stand by powerlessly as Israelis blocked supply trucks from entering the refugee camps. Or how the IDF had to indiscriminately shoot up Palestinian civilians who crowded a supply truck in Gaza. Or how the IDF had to launch targeted missile strikes against supply trucks in Gaza that had been identified to and were in continuous communication with Israeli authorities. All because Hamas forced the IDF to indiscriminately destroy practically all infrastructure in the Gaza strip, cut access to Israel-controlled utilities, lock down the border to Egypt, send a population of millions on a death march along designated routes it continued bombing, deliberately assassinate news reporters, bomb hospitals, destroy UN and NGO facilities and literally shoot hostages it mistook for Palestinians.
I have to believe you were intentionally trying to be provocative because to float "Hamas seizing food supplies for starving Palestinians" in 2026 without providing context for why those Palestinians are starving, let alone that the original claim has since pretty much been refuted, feels like a deliberate choice:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/26/world/middleeast/hamas-un...
https://www.timesofisrael.com/usaid-finds-no-proof-hamas-sys...
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israeli-officers-say-hama...
There are of course gangs stealing supplies to resell them at inflated prices on the black market but that tends to come with the territory when the only authorities in place become defunct because the entire region is turned into rubbles by a military force that considers anyone without a Jewish Israeli passport a likely terrorist unless proven otherwise.
Anyway, more on point: countries don't have excess food, economic entities do. And our economic system is generally fairly averse to making economic entities give up any property (even with fair compensation), especially when it comes to large corporations. If you want to form any plan that doesn't start with (literally) "seizing the means of (food) production", I think it would have to include the phrase "create market incentives" but I'm not sure there is a better incentive than "people are willing to give you all their money because your product has become scarce" - though of course that hinges on "all their money" being more than you make now and that doesn't tend to hold up when it comes to the resource extraction economy based parts of the world.
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Distribution is only hard if you have to find a way to profit off of it. Hundreds food programs of all sizes can do it, from the UN food program, to states of all sizes with food assistance programs (i.e. almost every country), to a tiny charity. Heck even a ragtag bunch of Anarchists can distribute food with their Food Not Bombs charters.
The only thing preventing food being distributed to everybody that needs it is economics, specifically the type of economics which rewards exploitation, hording, and maldistribution. The people with power actually prefer it that way, some people being hungry is fine actually, as long as the rich and powerful in their own country gets to make more money.
Now I am not gonna dignify your genocide apologia with an answer. But you should feel ashamed to have written such hateful words right here on a tech forum.
> Many farmers are subsidised specifically so that food is over-produced in most years, specifically to ensure than in bad years people don't go hungry.
Which country does that? Here farmers were (very heavily) subsidised because footage of farmers walking off the land was political suicide for whichever party was in power at the time. When the subsidies were stopped by a government with a safe enough majority to be able to do it, many farmers did walk off the land. I've never heard of a government making sure there's over-production for future lean years.