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0 pointssaalweachter5y ago0 comments

The thing everyone always forgets about food production in armchair analysis is that it is not constant. Some years we produce more, some years we produce less. We can smooth across space and time to keep short-term or regional shortfalls from becoming a famine, and we do so most of the time, most places.

In any year, in any place where there is not a famine, we are, by definition, producing more food than anyone wants to consume, in aggregate at least if not for individuals. Whenever you are producing an excess of something, the price will fall.

Famine, if it happens, won't happen as a slow decline of food production, until at a predictable time we cross from producing 100.0000001% of the food the world needs to producing 99.9999999%. It will happen as a slow decline reducing our safety margin until some sort of three-sigma weather event makes for a really bad year -- flooding in some regions kill production here, drought in other regions kills production there, a blight on crops in otherwise fair weather, and the production for the next N months falls below the level of the stockpiles to last.

That is the point at which the market will react and food prices will go crazy. It won't do anything to help production -- some things take time, not money. It will just be the world playing musical chairs to see who gets left without enough food to eat.

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saddlerustle5y ago

Developed countries produce, not a little bit, but multiples of calories than is consumed because people choose to pay extra for tastier but less efficient calories through livestock, and tolerate food waste for convenient packaging and higher quality selection. I don't see any sign of a downwards trend in this ratio.

saalweachterOP5y ago

Oh yes; you can slaughter millions of extra cows and pigs in the US to realize a huge number of available calories, while redirecting the grain back to humans, all with no more ethical worries than you've already accepted in producing & consuming meat. A number of other inefficiencies can also go away under emergency conditions -- people will get less picky about their fruits and vegetables in a hurry, and it won't spend as long on supermarket shelves anyway.

From purely a US standpoint, yeah, I suspect our agricultural buffers are good enough for anything but a "volcano blotting out the sun" level deviation from the norm. Call it, four sigmas of food security. You'd need an event that only happens once every ten thousand years or so to really bring the US to its knees, agriculturally.

My point is -- I don't think food prices will shift much as long as the buffer is positive. If our margin narrows -- less livestock, more of it grass fed on marginal lands, grain spending less time in silos before being processed into food -- to two or three sigmas of food security, I don't think that you'll see food prices rise significantly, from market pressure.

I think if things go badly (and there's no guarantee of it at this point), it happens slowly at first, and then quickly, and you can't just point at food prices being low to say it's not about to turn from slow to quick.

to11mtm5y ago

> My point is -- I don't think food prices will shift much as long as the buffer is positive. If our margin narrows -- less livestock, more of it grass fed on marginal lands, grain spending less time in silos before being processed into food -- to two or three sigmas of food security, I don't think that you'll see food prices rise significantly, from market pressure.

The US is a strange beast when it comes to Agri. It's worth noting that there are conditions under which we are -destroying- surplus crops due to price controls rather than flooding the market.

Which to me is a bigger concern; this 'buffer' may cause price shifts to come with less warnings, and perhaps the first 'shock' will be a bit more than we would expect.

saddlerustle5y ago

The first effect of the margin narrowing would be lower meat production, which would exactly coincide with higher prices for meat.

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0 pointssaalweachter5y ago0 comments

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saddlerustle5y ago

saalweachterOP5y ago

to11mtm5y ago

The US is a strange beast when it comes to Agri. It's worth noting that there are conditions under which we are -destroying- surplus crops due to price controls rather than flooding the market.

Which to me is a bigger concern; this 'buffer' may cause price shifts to come with less warnings, and perhaps the first 'shock' will be a bit more than we would expect.

saddlerustle5y ago

The first effect of the margin narrowing would be lower meat production, which would exactly coincide with higher prices for meat.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse