India's Food-Security Problem Is Also the World's (wsj.com) 53
Climate change is already beginning to reshape global agriculture. India, the world's most populous country, looks particularly vulnerable: not just because of extreme weather, but because of government price controls. Fixing the problem is becoming more urgent, both for India and the world -- because India is a big food exporter, too. But politics makes that very difficult. From a report: In early December, India banned overseas shipments of onions until March in an effort to tame domestic prices. That is on top of export restrictions on rice, wheat and sugar already imposed over the past 18 months. And since India is the world's largest rice exporter, second-largest sugar and onion exporter, and a significant wheat producer, the bans are wreaking havoc globally. Thai rice prices had risen 14% and Vietnam rice prices had risen 22% from July levels by October, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute. Malaysia and the Philippines introduced their own measures to damp rising prices after India's curbs on rice exports in July.
Climate change will almost certainly pose a major problem for India's food supply. India's Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare recently estimated that, in the absence of adaptation measures, rain-fed rice yields could fall 20% by 2050. But domestic agricultural policies are almost as big a problem. At present, the government sets price floors for two dozen crops, guarantees purchases of certain agricultural products, and provides subsidies to farmers for fertilizers, electricity and transportation. All that might seem positive for food security, but on net it probably hampers investment and food supply growth. Price floors mean that supply might sometimes exceed final buyers' willingness to pay during slow times, leading to wastage. And restrictions on exports artificially depress domestic prices when global demand is hot. The government's own investigations have found that Agriculture Produce Marketing Committee laws, which regulate the trade of farmers' produce by providing licenses to buyers, commission agents and private markets, lead to cartelization and reduced competition.
Climate change will almost certainly pose a major problem for India's food supply. India's Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare recently estimated that, in the absence of adaptation measures, rain-fed rice yields could fall 20% by 2050. But domestic agricultural policies are almost as big a problem. At present, the government sets price floors for two dozen crops, guarantees purchases of certain agricultural products, and provides subsidies to farmers for fertilizers, electricity and transportation. All that might seem positive for food security, but on net it probably hampers investment and food supply growth. Price floors mean that supply might sometimes exceed final buyers' willingness to pay during slow times, leading to wastage. And restrictions on exports artificially depress domestic prices when global demand is hot. The government's own investigations have found that Agriculture Produce Marketing Committee laws, which regulate the trade of farmers' produce by providing licenses to buyers, commission agents and private markets, lead to cartelization and reduced competition.
what's it all about, Alfie? (Score:1, Informative)
"Climate change" is the first two words of the summary, but I'm not sure that the actual content really has anything to do with climate change. It's about government regulation of markets, and more particularly, government support of agriculture by price controls.
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It's about government regulation of markets, and more particularly, government support of agriculture by price controls.
It's also about climate change as that's changing what grows at the yields required to support both exports and domestic consumption. If there wasn't climate change there wouldn't be an issue but the particular way that agricultural policy is being implemented in the light of that is also a factor. Sometimes, events have more than one cause.
Re: what's it all about, Alfie? (Score:2)
First of all, climate change happens on a vastly different timescale than human population growth which is an order of magnitude slower still than political change.
Second of all, all climate change data suggests that plants and crops are growing better with more CO2 and more frequent rainfall. Moreover, building a dam has vastly more impact on the environment than climate change, which India has been shaping its geological environment on a much larger scale than anyone else in the world.
The biggest problem
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At present, the government sets price floors for two dozen crops, guarantees purchases of certain agricultural products, and provides subsidies to farmers for fertilizers, electricity and transportation. All that might seem positive for food security, but on net it probably hampers investment and food supply growth.
We had that too up until the 1980s, subsidising highly unproductive farms in an effort to placate the farming vote, which one of the major political parties was very dependent on. A party that wasn't dependent on it finally scrapped the subsidies, which led to serious short-term pain as non-viable farms collapsed, but long-term gain as more efficient farms took over, and others became more efficient.
Problem is that between A and B there were at least five years of people los
Is access to food a Human Right? (Score:2)
I predict that the next big crisis will be Food Insecurity, to include calls for increased centralized government control and a relaxation of the responsibility of the individual to feed themselves, culminating in the claim that access to food is a human right. I'm not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing...I'm just predicting that it will happen.
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Access to food is a basic human necessity, but opinions differ on whether basic necessities are human rights or not.
Food, clothes, and shelter are all basic human necessities, but access to all of those things is extremely uneven across the globe, even in most "rich" societies where there is provably more than enough to go around for all.
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If you live in the middle of the desert can you claim the same water rights as someone who lives in a temperate climate? Just because you choose to live in a place without water is everyone else obligated to start building pipelines to you?
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People don't choose where they are born and don't always have the means to move, especially to somewhere with a different language and with no job skills. Relocating these people might become a global priority at some point but they aren't going to be the ones bearing the cost.
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To say that they won't be the ones bearing the cost is mistaken. Already lots of them die trying to relocate.
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It's not only a basic human necessity, it has been the core function of government since the first civilizations arose. One might argue the entire original purpose of government, and it's still most basic function, is to make sure there is food. Pretty much every activity of civilization revolves around securing food supply.
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culminating in the claim that access to food is a human right.
It's been defined as a human right since 1948 (Universal Declaration of Human Rights).
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"Rights" are inherent, and not dependent on someone else's provision for you to exercise.
This is not correct, a "right" is only as good as it's ability to be enforced. You can claim to have a right to property or life but if I got enough guns and nobody with more is there to stop me, what rights do you have? Your house looks mighty nice this time of year....
The thing with rights is... we made em' up so we can make more of them rights if we want. Libertarians act like negative rights are borne from the universe and positive rights are fictitious but the truth is they are all fictitious, they
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Whether those rights are, as the writers of the Declaration of Independence believed, etched into the universe, or are simply the constructs of human beings, the depriving of rights frequently leads to pretty bad results; either people deemed not to enjoy those rights being enslaved, exiled or outright killed, or, in some cases, invading and taking the whole damned thing over. The whole notion of trying to create a universally recognized set of basic rights grew out of the horrors of the Second World War; n
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Yeah for sure, I just think it's important to remember what rights actually are. They come from people so they can be taken away by people, to believe they are inherent in the universe is to believe they are immutable which like you stated, history has shown to be anything but the case. I mean shit, there's examples where they just been voted away.
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Yes, and you could have easily looked that up. Article 25 in https://www.un.org/en/about-us... [un.org]
Your "prediction" stems from a lack of education, nothing else.
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Article 25 says nothing about increased centralized government control and a relaxation of the responsibility of the individual...which is obviously included in my prediction. So, why respond with an insult about education? Seriously, where does that come from?
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All our problems will food production and distribution are due to human corruption.
Partly. In fact, most of the actual starvation in the world is due to war and civil conflicts destroying food distribution.
If you want to end starvation, that's where you need to start.
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Doesn't change the fact that most of the actual starvation in the world currently is due to war.
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Hawaii can grow plenty of food to feed itself. Except a lot of the land is now used for tourism and you have to feed the tourists too. Hawaii exports a lot of food and imports more because of tourism.
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Hawaii exports a lot of food and imports more because of tourism.
Yup! People out here acting like they don't know what globalism and the econ 101 concept of comparative advantage [econlib.org]
It would be inefficient for Hawaii to grow all it's own food. It is very good at producing certain crops like papaya, sugarcane and pinapple so it exports those and imports things it's not good at producing.
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IIUC, it's just as common to starve people to weaken the political opposition. Long ago China had that as an official policy (IIUC two provinces were paired, and when famine struct, the one with a history of loyalty to the govt. got food supplies, and the other was left to fend for itself). These days I think it's generally a bit less blatant, but aid to political opponents is frequently stolen.
Yet Monsoonal Rainfall is the same or better. (Score:1)
I don't think you can blame "Climate Change" but the increasing population in India.
Average Monsoonal Rainfall and percentage of deviation from "normal"
Year rainfall(mm) Pct Diff From Normal
2015 764 -13.0
2016 989 12.5
2017 960 9.1
2018 919 4.5
2019 870 -1.1
2020 881 0.1
2021 993 12.9
2022 886 0.7
2023 876 -0.5
Population (according to the World Bank) has gone from 1.299B to 1.43B over those same years.
Your statistics are too simplistic (Score:3)
The Punjab this year saw massive flooding
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Yet your statistics suggest slightly below average rainfall!
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That's because average rainfall doesn't mean jack shit. it's not just how much rain fell during the year, but *when* it fell.
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A country with human and industrial resources like India could manage several dams and reservoirs to deal with some but not all fluctuations in rainfall. 80% of their rainfall comes during monsoon season as well.
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IIUC, historically India has depended on regular monsoons and on melt-water from the Himalayas. The melt-water has (IIUC) become both threatened and irregular.
OTOH, the govt. of India does appear to have a high level of corruption and political favoritism. (You could ask Canada about their respect for foreign countries' laws against assassination.)
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Dams are not some sort of cure all for flooding. First of all, if the geography isn't suitable, it may actually make problems worse. Water doesn't just magically disappear, and if you put a big dam in front of a large river, instead of just spreading horizontally and filling up a basin (presuming you have a basin or valley of suitable size), it will spread vertically, and then horizontally. To contain the largest rivers would basically require engineering on a scale far beyond anything anyone has ever tried
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Population (according to the World Bank) has gone from 1.299B to 1.43B over those same years.
I've often heard that you can pack the entire world's population in a single USA state or that we can grow enough food for everyone. First not everyone wants to live in a hong kong coffin apartment and achieving the lifestyle of middle class westerners with that amount of food requires more space than subsistence level economy. Many areas of the world simply cannot grow food in any meaningful quantity. Australia for example is a about as large as the USA yet most of the interior is desert. It produces food
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While I agree that the primary problem is overpopulation, and that with, say, 1B people on this dirtball, we could still easily be a high-tech civilization and many problems including climate change would just not be problems anymore, the human race is not mature enough to control its growth. First, you would have to get rid of all the religious fuckups, because they think population growth is just dandy and provides a nice supply of more victims for their respective cults. You would hence have to fight som
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Population (according to the World Bank) has gone from 1.299B to 1.43B over those same years.
Looks like India and its people (they are still sort-of a democracy) think it is a really splendid idea to see whether human overpopulation behaves like a bacterial colony. The latter dies from the center due to self-poisoning from a certain size on. Since they basically voted for this crap, my compassion for the population there as a whole is very limited.
Paywalled (Score:3)
Why do people post WSJ articles that you have to subscribe to to read?
From what I've read about the issue any attempt by the Indian government to adjust the agricultural sector results in mass protests so nothing ever changes.
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Because the editors are lazy AF and apparently own enough of Slashdot that they remain unfireable even after turning it to a shit general news site.
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Because it takes all of three seconds to paste the url into archive.ph and see the archived version. https://archive.is/oSff7 [archive.is]
Where's the beef? (Score:2)
The emperor has no clothes (Score:1)
Finally ... (Score:1)
The greatest threat we face from climate change is not rising sea levels (sorry to those who will be directly impacted by that) or stronger storms. It's food security.
Climate change doesn't just mean warming temperatures. It means every more erratic/unstable weather patterns. This is going to lead to once predictably productive farm land producing ever less regular harvests.
We were already struggling to feed the