Before I go into rage mode, I suppose I should ask, why Farmland?
Both Denmark and Netherland are big in agriculture export and they are very good at it. I am not against planting trees but it on top of farm land doesn't make any sense to me.
Haiti cut down all their trees. When a hurricane passes through it moves what little top soil they have into the ocean.[1] Haiti overfished their costal waters. Now they do not have fish to eat and worse can not participate in the single biggest economic driver in the Caribbean, scuba diving.
Planting trees on farms is incredibly important for maintaining and protecting the soil. The Americans learned that the hard way in the 1930s. [2]]
[1] https://www.climatechangenews.com/2022/08/05/us-funded-trees...
[2] https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/dust-bowl
> The Americans learned that the hard way in the 1930s.
Grasses, not trees, maintained and protected the soil for what became the US Dust Bowl.
The "Great American Desert" was essentially treeless. As your [2] links points out, European agricultural methods "[exposed] the bare, over-plowed farmland. Without deep-rooted prairie grasses to hold the soil in place, it began to blow away."
> "Like all the others, he had allowed the advertisers to multiply his wants; he had learned to equate happiness with possessions, and prosperity with money to spend in a shop. Like all the others, he had abandoned any idea of subsistence farming to think exclusively in terms of a cash crop; and he had gone on thinking in those terms, even when the crop no longer gave him any cash. Then, like all the others, he had got into debt with the banks. And finally, like all the others, he had learned that what the experts had been saying for a generation was perfectly true : in a semi-arid country it is grass that holds down the soil; tear up the grass, the soil will go. In due course, it had gone.
The man from Kansas was now a peon and a pariah; and the experience was making a worse man of him."
-- Aldous Huxley, "After Many a Year Dies the Swan" -- 1939
They were warned what would happen. Yes, it was the grasses that keep the soil in place.
However, as the article you referenced says,
> "As part of Roosevelt’s New Deal, Congress established the Soil Erosion Service and the Prairie States Forestry Project in 1935. These programs put local farmers to work planting trees as windbreaks on farms across the Great Plains. The Soil Erosion Service, now called the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) developed and promoted new farming techniques to combat the problem of soil erosion." [2]
A bunch of people didn't understand this in Haiti and now they are severely doomed and suffering. Probably not something you want to be incorrect about on the global scale.
Although, it is the grasses that hold the top soil in place, it can be mitigated by planting trees.
> They were warned what would happen.
They also believed in "rain follows the plow."
> windbreaks on farms
Sure, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plains_Shelterbelt .
But that was only one of many techniques developed. https://archive.org/details/bighughfatherofs0000well/page/11... mentions "if subject to wind erosion, it calls for stubble-mulch farming, wind strips and windbreaks." (That's a biography about Hugh Hammond Bennett, who led the Soil Erosion Service ... but not the Shelterbelt!)
In general (a few paragraphs earlier):
'Modern soil conservation is based on sound land use and the treatment of land with those adaptable, practical measures that keep it permanently productive while in use,” he explains. “It means terracing land that needs terracing; and it means contouring, strip cropping, and stubble-mulching the land as needed, along with supporting practices of crop rotations, cover crops, etc., wherever needed. It means gully control, stabilizing water outlets, building farm ponds, locating farm roads and fences on the contour, and planting steep, erodible lands to grass or trees.“'
Earlier at https://archive.org/details/bighughfatherofs0000well/page/96... you can read about the then-novel idea of contouring;
"Tillage is proceeding across the slopes, rather than up and down hill. It is being done on the contour on 15,362 acres. Farmers are finding that it not only serves as a brake on running water but also reduces the cost of mule-power and tractor-power."
Oh, interesting. In 'Predicting and Controlling Wind Erosion', Lyles (1985) writes "Despite the credit the Prairie States Forestry Project has received in ending the Dust Bowl, windbreak plantings under the Project did not begin on a large scale until 1936", and says "the cardinal principle of wind erosion control is maintaining vegetative materials on the soil. ... this practice of conserving or maintaining vegetation on the surface has evolved into various forms of tillage management, which currently go under the generic name of conservation tillage and have become a major technique for erosion control." (See https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3742385.pdf )
This suggests again that trees and windbreaks in general are not the primary solution to the regions affected by the Dust Bowl, but rather grasses, including crops.
I don't see how Haiti situation applies to Denmark.
Scuba diving really? You’d think cruise ships and a large airport would be a lot more significant.
You left out the part where Haiti was destabilized and crushed by colonial debt. And I don’t think that lack of fish is what’s keeping the tourists away. But hey, weren’t we talking about Denmark ?
So is that relevant because it means that cutting down all the trees want their fault, or because it provides an alternate explanation for what mechanism is causing the soil to else?
And obviously the connection to Denmark is meant to be that a lack of trees causes problems so replacing things with trees must be good. Even if there hasn't been news about those problems happening there.
Denmark has had massive erosion problems for decades to the point there used to be signs about it when I used to go there as a kid in the 1980's.
Denmark drained the only source of natural diversity it had, its marshlands, after World War I and turned the entire country into farmland. Outside the cities, it is endless fields of farmland. And now its chickens have come home to roost, having poisoned the soil and rivers. This is entirely Denmark's fault, and now they're trying to reverse some of the damage they did.
Denmarks agricultural performance is not great at all. it's way too expensive to produce stuff. if it wasn't for EU subsidies the agricultural sector in Denmark would loose over 50% of their profits. To drive the point home the agricultural sector in Denmark only makes up 3.6% of the bnp and 4.3% of exports while taking up 60% of Denmarks total area and employing around 3.9% of the working population. i think Denmark can easily let go of 10% while only having miniscule effects on the economy. Denmark is a very small country and technically has no truly wild nature.
> Denmarks agricultural performance is not great at all. it's way too expensive to produce stuff. if it wasn't for EU subsidies the agricultural sector in Denmark would loose over 50% of their profits.
Agriculture in the EU is renowned for not being financially unjustified. For decades it's been a finantial no-brainer to import the bulk of agricultural products from south America and Africa. This is not new or the result of some major epiphany, it's the natura consequence of having an advanced economy and a huge population with high population density. The EU already imports 40% of the agricultural products it consumes.
EU subsidies were created specifically to mitigate the strategic and geopolitical risk of seeing Europe blockaded. Agricultural subsidies exist to create a finantial incentive to preserve current production capacity when it makes no finantial sense, and thus mitigate a strategic vulnerability.
You'd think that people would have realized this after Europe avoided mass death from Russian gas being cut off only because the winter was mild.
Considering that we're doing the barest of the minimum about it three years in, yeah, you'd think.
Interesting way to frame "Russian gas being cut off" instead of "most likely US orchestrated biggest ally to ally sabotage in history".
I'm still mad about it, yes. Germany's dependence on Russian gas was a terrible thing, but risking my livelihood for 4D geopolitics chess is much worse.
Germany's dependence on Russian gas was (failed) 4D geopolitical chess in itself. I'm mad at that.
> the winter was mild.
Sure about that? I remember a cold winter.
> Blizzards, record winds, red weather warnings and biting cold. The long winter of 2023/2024 has featured heavy precipitation and a number of extreme weather events.
https://www.uu.se/en/news/2024/2024-03-04-a-researcher-expla...
And
> Large parts of Europe are starting the 2023-2024 winter season with an abundance of snow and cold, a stark contrast from last year, which was abnormally warm and snowless.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/12/04/europe-sno...
Resistance to a blockade doesn’t require subsidies for growing flowers etc.
Subsidizing exports similarly has very different goals.
Sure it does. The goal is keep the farmland available and productive along with keeping agricultural infrastructure. The USA helped win WW2 because our car factory lines were retooled to make war machines.
Demand for war materials goes up in a war, but the population and thus food demand isn’t going to drastically spike.
There’s a reasonable argument for having a food stockpile in case of emergencies, but extra farmland is harder to justify.
The demand won't spike, but the need to switch to local production necessitates some way to locally produce.
That’s limited by the country’s basic requirements not the total amount of farmland available. People may prefer wine and beef in surplus resulting in an obesity epidemic, but that’s not required here. You don’t want 350 lb soldiers or recruits.
In the case of the US, we turned much of the richest farmland into subdivisions. The breadbasket of the nation is powered by an aquifer that will be depleted in my kids lifetime. Most of our green goods come from the deserts of California and Arizona, and won’t exist if the Colorado River water system breaks down.
That aquifer is being depleted because of farm subsidies not in spite of them.
The US’s domestic demand for food is vastly below the actual production, exports and biofuels need not be maintained in a war.
You are going to stockpile years worth of food for an entire country?
No, if you expect farmland to produce 0 food then having extra farmland is pointless. 0 * 2 X = 0 * X = 0.
The point of extra farmland is to make up for some expected shortfall, but you’re better off stockpiling food during productive periods than have reserve capacity for use when something else is going wrong.
PS: It is common to have quite large stockpiles of food. Many crops come in once a year and then get used up over that year. But that assumes a 1:1 match between production and consumption, a little extra production = quite a large surplus in a year.
The government has all sorts of policy goals. Resilience, employment, etc.
In the US, Nixon era policy and legal thinking drives all things. Price is king, except it isn’t. Our crazy governance model means that corn is better represented than humans, so our food is more expensive, less nutritious, and our supply chains are incredibly fragile.
Let me get this right. To save the planet Denmark wants to stop producing food locally and instead import more? So those pig farts gotta go but the bunker fuel used to ship grain from a slash and burn rainforest farm in Brazil is a-ok.
Utterly brain dead. So much so that you know someone’s getting paid from these decisions.
you got it.. and grain is not the only thing we get shipped from Brazil.. to look green, we've replaced most our coal burning for energy with bio fuels, essentially wood and that gets shipped in from Brazil as well.. very green.. because fuck nuclear, because of.. checks notes.. reasons
and Brazil does that while keeping 60% of its territory as native forests.
> specifically to mitigate the strategic and geopolitical risk of seeing Europe blockaded
No, its because far lobbies are an important political block
Both can be true.
Protecting your agricultural capacity is what convinces the part of the population that does not directly benefit from the subsidies.
> No, its because far lobbies are an important political block
Wrong. If you try to educate yourself, you will notice that EU's common agricultural policy even went to the extent of paying subsidies to small property owners to preserve their properties as agricultural land. This goes way beyond subsidizing production, or anything remotely related to your conspiracy theory.
Just because someone benefits from subsidy programs that does not mean that any conspiracy theory spun around the inversion of cause and effect suddenly makes sense. I recommend you invest a few minutes to learn about EU's common agricultural policy before trying to fill that void with conspiracies.
They can write all they want. The fact is, the countries wouldn't cant get rid of their farm policies because of voting. And the EU, is an outgrowth of those already existing countries. EU policy is not handed down from a white tower. Of course you can't actually say that.
Farmers and people supporting farmers are still a small minority and while they can probably swing some election in some country if they were to massively support only one party or coalition, the money comes for the strategic importance. It would be naive to think it's just "for the votes".
It was a long time ago that I have looked into this. My understanding from the political science is that countries where farmers votes aren't as important, also have far less subsidizes.
Groups that already have subsidizes are better at defending them. Even if in absolute terms their numbers aren't as big.
They are totally going to defend themselves, mainly through boycotts, barricades and varying degrees of riots. That can totally cause a vote issue, but it's because the rest of the population is pissed off by the road blocks etc
What's your source for 4.3% of exports? This source says 22%.
https://agricultureandfood.dk/media/m1qfuuju/lf-facts-and-fi...
You are posting literal propaganda from the biggest agro lobbyist. That number is about the "Danish food cluster". That is all food related business output. Enzyme production and such. They have tried for a long time to conflate the farming sector with the whole food industry to muddy their importance.
i admit that i haven't read the sources listed here
https://www.dyrenesbeskyttelse.dk/artikler/landbrugets-bundl...
and also that this source is probably biased toward minimizing the numbers while your source might be pulling in the other direction. the true number is probably somewhere in between and depends on what you include. like, could the raw products be imported instead and the refined in Denmark without those 22% taking a hit?
3.6% of bnp seems like little but I think agriculture counts for more than, say, management consulting that goes through 5 intermediaries (does it get counted towards the bnp 5x then? I'm not sure). At the end of the day money is only an abstraction while food, you can actually eat it.
yes, but like 50-70% of the crops grown is animal feed. if Denmark really needed efficient food for the population i think the whole thing could be done more efficiently and those 10% won't be missed.
A lot of “farmland” is unproductive and kept in usage only by heavy subsidies. Additionally, I think a more important/interesting part of the article is taxation of livestock - you reduce the land needed significantly when the amount of livestock is reduced. I’m not vegan/vegetarian but it is “obvious” we should reduce meat consumption for a wide range of reasons and focus on raising livestock in ways that are beneficial to the wider environment.
Yes, the least productive 10% of land represents a much smaller percentage of food production. This is often land in areas that are most environmentally sensitive.
In the UK we pay farmers to raise lamb on marginal land yet they still aren't competitive with lamb shipped from the other side of the world. I'm not sure why we should be subsidising that, especially when there is a lot of environmental damaged associated with it.
Could food security in case of another global crisis be a good enough reason? I don't know anything about the British situation AT ALL, but I think many in Europe think slightly different about the market-based solution when it comes to both food, medicines, and other essentials after corona.
It turns out that when shit hits the fan, countries need to handle the basic needs of their population themselves.
People don't need lamb in an emergency.
Exactly... I find all the arguments in the style of "but we need food" extremely disingenuous when it comes to meat production. Almost without exception, more food could be produced by converting land used for animal agriculture into land used to grow food directly for human consumption.
Just having farmland be fields is not very good for the land or the eco system. Breaking up farmland with hedges, woods, wetlands or whatever nature decides it should be is often a good idea. Next best thing is to manually plant trees.
Edit: add planting trees
> Breaking up farmland
One thing I have wondered was the relative benefits of a concentrated wilderness versus distributed habitat.
The common agricultural policy set-aside distributes payments for the wilderness across many farms (for equity, one supposes), whereas a concentrated wilderness would benefit few (and probably only the landowners).
For a short period I looked into carbon stuff and while forests were good, wetlands were deemed much bigger sinks.
It feels like wetlands is a huge ignored area. If what I read at the time holds (I think it was like 6-12x sequestration rate in some regions), a simple thing like rising sea levels would have a huge impact.
And anthropogenic destruction of wetlands is also a huge issue and one that is relatively easy to reverse in a lot cases (dams, rerouted rivers). And in some cases, water can just be rerouted occasionally to create temperarly wetlands that are good ecosystems as well. Mossy Earth I think is doing some of these.
Strangely enough I have been seeing wetland creation coming up on my radar recently. Hinkley Point C nuclear power station has been proposing these as alternative to acoustic fish deterrent, but the locals who might be affected are not happy.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgzwrgv71no
It would transform the biodiverse habitat into barren, species-poor salt marsh and tidal mud.
I do a lot of volunteering work with the Woodland Trust in the UK, negotiating with people who want to donate their land to restoration purposes. Britain is a land of fields and hedgerows (distributed). Many people fail to understand that most "wilderness" that we want to bring back is reliant on density (or concentration). I know many land owners who want to rewild parts of theirs, but are expecting temperate rainforest on a plot of land a couple acres across. It doesn't work like that.
The only way to bring back these lost or dying ecosystems is across large stretches of land, hundreds if not thousands of acres across. We have tiny pockets left in Cornwall, Wales and Scotland, but for the most part the country is ecologically baren in comparison to that a couple of thousand years ago.
Vast and continuous National Parks are one of the few viable ways to maintain or bring back our species rich ecosystems. Distributed "wilderness" between city blocks or cattle grazing land is duct tape on a leaky bucket.
Because there's nothing else? 60% of Denmark is farmed land, most of the rest is cities, industry, or suburbs.
Where else would you like them to plant trees? Tearing up residential areas to convert to forest would be massively expensive and likely unpopular.
Places that used to be forested and are not productive farmland. There’s lots of places like this, just maybe not in Denmark.
Quick history lesson: After the war, with Prussia in 1864, Denmark lost about 33% of it's area. That part was some of the most suited to agriculture. To compensate for those loses Denmark started a process of turning previously unusable land in to farmland. So lakes where drained, the the moors were drained, areas with sandy soil, good for nothing but growing common heather, was heavily fertilised and forests where cut down. There where even suggestion to drain parts of the sea between Denmark and Sweden.
In some sense it was good, and basically help shape modern Denmark, but it's just not needed anymore, and has come at the cost of wildlife, native plants and sea creatures. It didn't start out like that, but when you add modern intensive farming on top of killing of most of your nature areas, then things starts to go very wrong. Denmark has almost nothing of it's original nature left.
> just maybe not in Denmark
exactly, and we're talking about Denmark, after all
That last bit is correct, there aren’t many places like that in Denmark. So the original question remains, where would be a better place for them specifically to plant these trees?
Not really. Trees plant themselves. If it’s not being actively used for something/mowed it’ll turn back into forest.
This isn't really true. Growing a forest is way more complicated than you might think - they don't just sprout spontaneously, as trees take a long time to grow and are easily kept down by fauna, landscape, nutrient levels, erosion, and many other factors.
I don't remember the details, but I believe it goes something like farm -> heath -> shrubland -> young forest -> mature forest, where each phase has a unique ecosystem of both plant species and animal life.
In an extremely heavily cultivated landscape like Denmark (seriously, look at a satellite photo), converting farmland back into forest is a multi-decade project requiring constant maintenance. Converting farmland into marshland (which is the "original" stone-age landscape in many areas) is a multi-century project.
Just like it was a multi-century project to convert it into farmland, by the way. Europe has been cultivated for millennia.
Exactly. It only takes a couple of decades for nature to reforest, which is an eyeblink, actually. And only a couple more decades to return to mature forest. No humans or projects needed. There is a lot more forest in New England (USA) now, than a century ago.
Tree planting in eroded/damaged ecosystems requires a helping hand - everything from site prep, germination, watering, etc.
Source: I’ve planted thousands of trees.
In the US that would be a bunch of only invasive species for a long time.
Eventually it returns to forest within a lifetime. In certain parts of the midwest you see fields of farmland and occasionally squares of trees in them. Chances are in the early 19th century all of what you saw was farmland and at one point not as much was actively farmed and certain fields no longer plowed. All the trees you find in that plot of what looks like the holdover of some carved up midwestern forest are actually all less than 100 years old and relatively recent growth.
the Netherlands exports so much food (and meat...) that it becomes a burden on local wildlife and milieu, mostly due to nitrogen emissions, pesticides and fertilizer.
I think it's the same for Denmark, though the mostly hold pigs in stead of cattle.
I think that there is an official and an unofficial reason. The official is that something must be returned to nature before climate change destroys everything. The unofficial is, in my opinion, that EU politicians are terrified by US elections.
In all western countries, far right groups are crawling to grab more and more power gradually. Those groups feed basically on farmer followers, ruthlessly brainwashed with fake news, antiscience and outrage, and the system has proven to work well (See US).
Until now traditional parties believed that could control the situation and appease the farmers with more money, and maybe even benefit of some votes of grateful people on return. The wake up has being brutal. Each euro given to farmers is just a victory reclaimed by this groups, that nurture a higher discontent.
So now that they are coming for they political heads and the time is running out, traditional politicians feel the pressure to take some delayed unpleasant decisions before is too late, and getting rid of the fake farmers to build a market from there is a first step. If fake farmers can sell subsidized meat for a lower price, the real farmers suffer for it.
> The official is that something must be returned to nature before climate change destroys everything.
Nature is an abstraction, not a weird angry god. We need to capture GHG and stop emitting more but that’s pretty much it. That will most likely involve reforestation as it’s a good carbon sink but using the expression “returning thing to nature” is not a correct way to frame it.
> why Farmland?
Because trees don't grow well in the ocean? :)
There is developed areas (cities/towns/industry) and farm land.
Most of the land not suitable for farming was turned into farm land. Through extremely hard work over the past 150 years. Like straightening rivers, draining marshes, and planting up the heath.
Because it’s becoming increasingly obviously dumb to be paying farmers money to pretend like they are farming their land. What I mean is that if we removed the subsidies the farmers wouldn’t farm their land, the market just doesn’t work to support their production. So we are essentially saying “if you pretend to farm your land we’ll make sure you profit” but even at that they of cause need to try to keep the pretend farming profitable enough that the entire charade pays off, but that means dumping a ton of fertilizer on the land, which tends to run off and ruin streams and seeps into the ground water. Most recently this has led to the agricultural industry competeley and likely semi permanently destroying the fishing industry around one of the major pars of Denmark. So at this point the farmers have to stop.
There’s a natural way of doing that, which is to cut subsidies and let the market handle it. But the farmers have political power because they have a lot of money because of the policies they’ve set up back when they had political power because they had a lot of money… Anyways, so what is actually happening is that the farmers have decided that if their land is unprofitable then the government needs to pay a hefty price to them for it.
The government could just cut the subsidies which means we would use less money, then buy the land in bankruptcies, likely just with the money we spend less. Instead we’ll see a lot of additional spending to buy the land, and then down the line subsidies will increase to “make up” for all the land they “lost”.
> Because it’s becoming increasingly obviously dumb to be paying farmers money to pretend like they are farming their land.
This is a particularly ignorant and clueless opinion to have.
The whole point of Europe's common agricultural policy is to preserve the potential of agricultural production as a strategic asset. Europe's strong economy and huge population density, coupled with cheap access to agricultural production from south America and Africa, renders most agricultural activity economically unfeasible. The problem is that this means Europe is particularly vulnerable to a blockade, and in case of all out war the whole continent risks being starved in a few months.
The whole point of EU's common agricultural policy is to minimize this risk.
Owners of farmland are provided a incentive to keep their farms on standby even if they don't produce anything exactly to mitigate this risk. It would be more profitable to invest in some domains such as, say, real estate. Look at the Netherlands: they are experiencing a huge housing crisis and the whole land in Holland consists of dense urban housing bordered by farm land. It would be tempting for farmers to just cash out on real estate if they didn't had an economic upside.
You would do better if you educated yourself on a topic before commenting on it.
> It would be tempting for farmers to just cash out on real estate if they didn't had an economic upside.
That’s tempting even with subsidies. I have friend who own farming land at the outskirts of the city, they rent it to a farmer at almost net zero to themselves after taxes, but would make a small fortune if they could develop the land. The reason farmers don’t sell their land to real estate and 100x the value instantly isn’t that they don’t want to because of subsidies, it’s that they aren’t allowed to due to zoning laws, and zoning laws are what they are to protect property values, because everyone involved in designing them own at minimum one property. The only political party we have representing renters in any capacity never get any power in the governmental bodies that govern zoning laws.
> The whole point of Europe's common agricultural policy is to preserve the potential of agricultural production as a strategic asset.
Nothing about that required the current setup. Imagine if we were talking about government subsidies for private militias because we needed to maintain the much more directly important military capacity. Wouldn’t that be crazy? Why is the farming subsidies seen differently. Why must the government pay to private institutions who’s worth had disappeared. If we want governments to maintain farmable land so be it. We don’t have to finically support an artificial elite based them having owned a one profitable asset. Just let it degrade in value and buy it when it hits bottom.
> Imagine if we were talking about government subsidies for private militias because we needed to maintain the much more directly important military capacity. Wouldn’t that be crazy?
Not really? It is very protective to maintain an agricultural, energy, and industrial base; not doing so is immensely risky.
Take Germany the first winter after the Ukraine invasion as an example, a mad scramble to fill a huge hole in their energy sector. Imagine the same scenario but with food, or munitions.
You simply cannot rely solely on global supply chains for industries that are critical to survival of a nation. The ability to power, feed, and defend yourself is a primary concern of a nation state and is worth economic inefficiency.
With all that said, I have _no_ idea how Europe and Denmark specifically does subsidies for agriculture. It could be asinine. But philosophically, imo, it is uncontroversially necessary in some form or another. It is far too risky to save a penny on importing wheat from Brazil and risk famines.
> Why is the farming subsidies seen differently
Because you can live without private militias but you can't live without food?
With this type of argument you can demonstrate that lots of things have strategic importance. Steel? Check. Textiles? Check. Asphalt? Check. We should subsidize everything. Yet, when the military threat actually materializes and you need to manufacture 155mm shells, all the strategic planning seems quite useless.
Everything you are listing is indeed very much strategic and Europe was indeed extremely stupid to let that go. The end of your paragraph is a demonstration of that. It doesn’t go against the core idea.
In the US, we have sextupled 155mm shell production.
If war breaks out, you need to feed people, maintain roads, build vehicles, etc.
Europe has a huge coastline, it's impossible to blockade. If war breaks out, it's better to shift workers from agriculture to war-related production, and import food from places that are not at war, such as South America. Food produced in Europe is basically a luxury. For every kilogram of beef produced in Denmark, you can buy 2.5 kg of Argentinian beef.
While Europe has a long coastline, there are only a given number of ports capable of the high thoroughput needed to feed Europe’s population. Blockade those and the entrance to the Baltic and Mediterranean, and most of your work is done. Moreover, in a shooting war, merchant ships from other global regions attempting to supply Europe would be targeted.
> Moreover, in a shooting war, merchant ships from other global regions attempting to supply Europe would be targeted.
This happened before, twice. The solution was convoys, it worked both times.
The convoys barely worked. Parts of Europe were desperately short of food for several years. And the non-Axis countries couldn't manage to defeat the blockade on their own: they needed help from the USA to accomplish anything.
It didn't work for Japan though. The US could've kept Japan impotent and hungry indefinitely without invading or nuking it. The main reason for nuking it was to get it to surrender before Stalin could enter the fight and take part of Japan.
Who is this hypothetical battle to be fought against? Surely anyone with sufficient power to mount a blockade has nuclear missiles and at that point it's kind of moot...
Note that I actually agree with your position but this is an interesting discussion on a topic I hadn't thought about deeply enough!
Let me see... Well, there was this thing in the past, called WW2, it was a WW, because well, Germany for example didn't want France buying Brazillian agricultural products, and sunk Brazillian ships using submarines. Thus making Brazil join the war.
Right now Lula wants to form a coalition with Russia, so what makes you think, in case of war, Brazil would keep selling to the EU? Maybe because USA would threathen Brazil? In that case they would focus on feeding themselves, and not the EU still.
In the entirety of human history, a base war tactic is Siege. What makes you think nobody will try it again?
In New Zealand the believe that if they removed farm subsidizes, their farmers would quite. Now they are a massive farm product exporter.
To be more accurate - by removing subsidies, NZ farmers became more efficient and sell their products at the world price, which is quite often overseas.
Subsidies and/or tarrifs always distort the market and have unintended consequences.
Not sure why you say 'more accurate'. What you state is what I implied. I hope this was clear.
What removing subsidies do is unleash the potential. Lots of farming communities that live with subsidies are convinced that removing them is a dooms day scenario.
However evidence often doesn't support this. Japan used to protect its market for beef. Then this was forced to be opened by the US. Japan farmer then realized that their specialization was high quality beef. And now Japan is globally famous and exports lots of high quality beef.
Removing subsidies can lead to structural changes and consolidation, but it can also have lots of positive effects.
Does it pencil out though? You go from more farmers making less profit and getting subsidy to smooth things over and then they go ahead and spend most of that back in the economy running the business presumably.
And the other situation is no subsidy, fewer players as they have to take what little profit there is and spend it more on overhead, and presumably less money reinvested in the local economy overall because of less economic activity from fewer players as well as that subsidy no longer being available to spend back on overhead and recirculate into the economy. And profit is presumably held by fewer and wealthier people who spend even less proportionally in the local economy than someone with less means.
That's only true if you ignore that the government can spend that money on something else. And the successful farmers are actually net tax payers.
Compare subsidies to farmers, all farmers are highly inefficient farming with no exports. No great public transport system and roads with potholes.
To:
No subsidies. Highly efficient farmers that export. Fantastic bus connection and roads in the whole countryside.
> take what little profit there is
Before there was no net profit at all, it was a net lose to society. You were moving profits from other sectors to the farm sector.
> And profit is presumably held by fewer and wealthier people
If a farmer is successful, they should make money, just like people in all other sectors in the economy.
Nobody makes the argument that we should subsidize all manufacturing, so that we can have lots of small relatively poor manufacturing sites that lose money.
This if course doesn't necessarily work for every country, but the general doom and gloom about subsidy is often proven wrong.
Do you think food production has national security implications or do you think "the market" will be happy to sell you food during another global conflict while their own citizens are starving?
Farming subsidies are a national security tool, not a handout.
Anyway, it's clear that your position is political in nature otherwise you'd be just as outraged by green subsidies.
Denmark set aside DKK 53.5 billion for green subsidies in 2022. But this isn't market distortion to the same degree as farming subsidies, is it? That's the flaw in your argument. It's inconsistently applied based on politics, isn't it?
There’s a big difference between supporting food security and subsidising otherwise unviable land usage and farming practices. In the UK, there are subsidies for upland farming for sheep with produces a negligible amount of food at high cost (monetary and environmental) for next to no return for the farmers even after the subsidy.
Re. green subsidies that is better characterised as investment in technology of the future. You might also like to compare subsidies to the fossil fuel sector as well.
How does having such a large surplus that you’re an exporter of food jive with national security? It sounds like they already produce more than enough. Exposing food production entirely to market forces is, as you point out, a bad idea.
Sounds like you’ve fallen for some farmer rhetoric.. How is growning crops to feed 28 million pigs to 6 million people? We’d have to eat 5 pigs each.. If it was really about food security, we’d surely plant crops to eat ourselves, which is much more efficient in terms of calorie per m^2.
Meat has many more negative externalities than plants. Thats the argument for substituting green farming.
Of course it’s political.. anything is to some degree.
Because of animals we grow far more grain than we need, giving us a substantial amount of necessary slack. If there is a wide spread crop failure, the price of grain rises, causing ranchers to sell breeding stock they can no longer afford to feed. Then humans then eat the grain instead of the animals.
Growing x100 times the amount of food needed isn’t ‘slack’, its production for export (or feeding pigs to export). We could cut out farmland by 50% and still have more than enough to feed our own population. This food security argument would only hold if there was any possibility of us actually not being able to feed our population.
100X? A chicken is 1.8x and a pig is 3X. A cow is 12X, but that'd only be a relevant figure if humans could eat grass.
> How does having such a large surplus (...)
You should educate yourself. Europe imports around 40% of the agricultural production it consumes.
The "surplus" is referenced in economical value and reflects luxury exports such as wine, which is hardly what keeps Europe alive in case of all-out war.
The whole point of Europe's common agricultural policy is food security including an event of all-out war.
Your comments sound like advocating against having a first-aid kit just because you sell silk scarves.
Please provide some sources, because I think your 40% is also based on monetary and not nutritional value.
Destroying fisheries goes directly against food security. Fishes are more efficient as source of food by energetic reasons.
I don’t understand why this is being downvoted but this is very true, and it’s the literal case that the fisheries around the entirety of the Bornholm region of Denmark have been completely shut down because the farming industry runoff destroyed it. Had it not been for subsidies the farming industry wouldn’t have done this. We literally paid people to deliberately destroy our environment. Is insane and everyone’s just looking to the sky like “what are we supposed to do? We’ve tried nothing at all even though there has been consistent warnings for two decades and it still happened!?”
> Anyway, it's clear that your position is political in nature otherwise you'd be just as outraged by green subsidies.
The green subsidies are also paid out to farmers… it is outrageous. Imagine if we were still paying subsidies to weavers because of their “strategic importance in case of war” and also paying them green subsidies to avoid using the toxic chemicals they would otherwise use doing the thing they are only doing in the first place because it justifies the theater that has the state maintaining their consistent income.
Well they aren’t really subsidizing based on having everything you need on shore. They still specilize into a few monocrops and have to trade to fill the rest of a balanced diet for the population. No one is calculating how much butter would be needed to last a multi year siege and dolling out subsidize to the dairy farmers on that I don’t think.
> Farming subsidies are a national security tool, not a handout.
It's absurd to not acknowledge they are both.
This is often the justification but in many countries agriculture systems are not oriented towards food security: they produce a large share of export crops/products and thus also rely on imports. If they were an actual national security tool, they would be more focus on not relying on imports and not helping exports, right?
Rage mode over more forest? Are you a psycho?
> Both Denmark and Netherland are big in agriculture export and they are very good at it.
And both are tiny and being swarmed by sustainability issues.
We pay farmers not to plant fields in the US. Here in the Eastern half, much of this farm land setting idle receives adequate rain and sunshine. Farmers have to mow (brush hog) the fields every year or two to prevent trees and brush from naturally taking over. Economically it makes little sense.
Where this might actually make sense is around waterways to prevent erosion. And farmers have taken down a large percentage of the tree rows between fields that were planted in the dust bowl days in an effort to use every inch of their field.
Although, I am personally in favor of simple regulations instead cash handouts.
I'm of the opinion food security - even at great expense - is the primary thing a nation should be concerned with as a society. At the level where producing enough calories to feed your total population if things truly hit the fan as a hard requirement for every nation on the planet. This is not something you leave to "free trade" or whatnot. Obviously that doesn't mean every calorie need be provided in the most luxurious form - but in the end, there should be enough food produced to feed your people in the worst of times. Even at great expense and waste during the good times.
That all said - farming has gotten vastly more productive both per man hour and per acre over the past 100 years. Logically we simply do not need the same amount of land devoted to agriculture as we did before - at least in most cases.
So long as your food security is not being impacted - and I do mean under the worst possible stress model you can come up with - I don't see a problem with plans like this. Land use changes over time, and it should be expected.
Plus, it looks like a large portion of this will be simply a different form of agriculture - forestry. This will probably be more in-demand in 50-100 years with current trends, but that's a wild guess.
Read the post by gklitz: Agricultural practices are ruining the water supply. It's nice to have food security, but you also need drinkable water.
Groundwater in Denmark is drinkable and most people wanna keep it that way. But unfortunately, fertilizer has killed of huge areas of sealife.
The argument about security comes up a lot and makes intuitive sense. Although it seems far more complex than just protecting farmland and a simple yearly statistic. Developed countries can be ridiculously dependent on centralised supply chains to process and deliver food. And many of the inputs and equipment require a complex industrial base to support. We don't just need the space to grow food. We need to feed it, protect it from pests, harvest it, process it, deliver it to people. In most countries Iit is very dependent on electricity, heavy industry and global trade for equipment.
> That all said - farming has gotten vastly more productive both per man hour and per acre over the past 100 years
We also have way more people to feed and house than 100 years ago, you cannot look at productivity increase in isolation, demand for both food and land has also risen significantly.
Denmark is not even close to jeopardizing its food supply, even less its food security. It produces way more food than is needed to feed its own population.
> Denmark is not even close to jeopardizing its food supply, even less its food security. It produces way more food than is needed to feed its own population.
Denmark is a part of the EU. Their agricultural policy follows EU's common agricultural policy. Food security is evaluated accounting for all members, not individual member-states in isolation. In case of a scenario that puts food security at risk, such as an all-out war, it's in her best interests of all member states if the whole Europe can preserve it's food security.
If we are ever in a situation where food security becomes a real issue in the EU - and that’s an almost unfathomably big if - then the first step would be to actually grow food for humans, instead of food for animals that are then exported to China as meat products.
Food security is simply not a relevant concern here.
Because Denmark is almost entirely cities and farmland?
There’s already a housing crisis…
Nitrogen emissions from farming are a big topic in the Netherlands. We have a right wing populist governments that wants to raise maximum speeds back to 130km/h but they can't because of nitrogen emissions that caused the previous government (also right leaning, pro car, etc.) to lower the limits. Intense cattle farming is a big environmental challenge in both countries and it comes at a price. Lots of farting cows in both countries.
Simple: Germany has a huge export surplus that China and the USA is unwilling to accept anymore.
Also, German economy is stagnate, based on a cheap russian gas and cooperation with china. So now, the idea is to target South America for exports while balancing it with import of South American foodstuff(EU-Mercosur agreement, that we know will not be ratified by individual countries in a democratic process, but by the Commission).
The problem Germany has to fix is the Common Agricultural Policy, that's one of the pillars of the EU. They are using the Green Agenda to force countries to reforest their fields. Of course the whole reforestation program is designed in a way that benefits states (Germany) that have got rid of their forests long time ago, and is unfavorable for countries that developed their agriculture after the WW2 - like Denmark and Finland.
Expect a heated discussion between Germany and France, rise of right wing parties in smaller countries, and a push for stricter integration.
https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/11/19/eu-mercosur-tra...
https://forest.fi/article/whos-to-pay-the-cost-of-eus-nature...
https://hir.harvard.edu/germanys-energy-crisis-europes-leadi...
Denmark did get rid of its forests a long time ago, after World War I. Germany has vast forests, a magnitude larger than those in Denmark, a country which is almost entirely farmland outside the cities. You have no idea what you're talking about.
Germany has been leaching off the EU for so long through the weak Euro, they now think it will always work. They are clearly putting France on a fast track to an exit via a far right government with the whole Mercosur agreement debacle.
I presume the EU has an excess. A lot of land is 'set aside' where you get an EU subsidy for not farming it so we don't end up with too much food.
Not all farm land is productive, so converting it back to forests and uncultivated land is better overall for the country.
Because the EU wants its member countries to care about the climate, even though it's completely overshadowed by the US and China not giving a shit
There is no way it's cost effective to produce food in Denmark. If people were rational about this Denmark would be 0-5% farmland. But racism/nationalism and irrational fears and entrenched political power exists so these sane changes only happen slowly. This is a country whose largest imports are (fish, animal feed, wine and cheese) and mostly from other European countries. If they were really worried about min-maxing they would be trading with other countries. They seem to be more preoccupied with keeping cash inside Europe and confusing old world status symbols with wealth.
It's as if your economic planning is based own how good it appears to a potential time traveler from 100 years ago
"The people work 30 hours a week and eat wine and cheese whenever they want! Everybody is rich!"
This is a very strange statement. Being able to produce the food needed for your own survival is about the most core national security issue there is.
And having people living healthy, well-fed, lives of leisure seems like a pretty good definition of rich to me. What’s the better one?