Everything you just described happens today, even considering your bogeyman of globalism. Visit Iowa or Saskatchewan if you don’t believe me. The nice thing about grain elevators is they’re fairly easy to spot from a distance. Had globalism taken them from us, a few people would have noticed.

If you think any first world nation is entirely reliant on global trade for subsistence of its populace (yes, even UK) you’ve been playing far too much Civilization. Now if you want to talk about the impact of globalism on crop markets and by extension a small operator, you have something to discuss. But you’re not saying that.

Given how many people would go through withdrawal if caffeine were to be unavailable all of a sudden, maybe nowadays coffee would be something worth having a bit of a stockpile of.

The Roosevelt-created grain reserve was a way to support the price of grain, not as a national security measure.

National food reserves are usually used like this (as a price buffer rather than a something to support security).

For example read about the National Raisin Reserve here: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/87144/15-strategic-reser...

I'm not saying that nothing should be stockpiled. A country should have dedicated emergency services, that should also plan for stuff they need in case of various emergencies. I don't think such a service would stock shipping containers, though.

Even with Covid we saw some of the hindsight comments. In the early days it was thought that ventilators were the bottleneck and they should have been stockpiled. But that seems to not have been an issue in the end. And if you were now to stockpile ventilators, perhaps the next pandemic would require something else.