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Comment by J-dawg | Hacker News Reader

Food is cheaper than at any other time in history. Make food expensive again and watch the wastage plummet. How to make food expensive?

- Stop subsidising farmers to over-produce

- End intensive farming of animals

- Ban imports from any country that refuses to do the same

In the process, you’d go a long way towards solving a whole bunch of environmental issues. The meat you’d produce would admittedly have a bigger carbon (and land) footprint, but the cost would make people eat less of it. Animal welfare would be massively improved.

People don’t value things that are cheap. This is one of those issues where no politician can admit the real cause, so they have to resort to posturing.

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I think an important question is how much slack does the system need?

Such huge overproduction of food seems wasteful until there's a risk of famine. As the effect of coronavirus on supply chains is currently demonstrating, there are potentially giant hidden costs to maximizing efficiency at a certain point in time.

I agree with drastically decreasing meat consumption, but food production in general is, AFAIK, a relatively minor portion of total greenhouse emissions (especially everything that is not meat and especially compared to how important food is sustaining human life).

Actually, Agriculture, Forestry, and Other Land Use is 24% of global greenhouse gas emissions (2010 numbers). That is second only to Electricity and Heat Production at 25%. So it isn't relatively minor, but it is, as you point out, an important activity.

At least according to this source... https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...

Thanks for this! I think I saw a graph where food production was only 9% and so was quite a bit smaller than the categories of industry, transportation, and electricity, but that could have been American rather than global.

For the sake of this discussion, it seems odd to include forestry with agriculture, but in any case agriculture is a more substantial part of global emissions than I thought.

Food may be cheaper than ever but there are also hundreds of millions of people who can barely afford to eat.

Any plan to intentionally raise the price of food across the board will result in millions of people being at risk of malnutrition or starvation. It's not something to suggest lightly.

The best plan for the climate is to kill all humans. But I don't think that's what we want.

In the developed world, food is so inexpensive that it is cheaper to wildly overproduce and ignore wastage. If you could eliminate poverty, you'd just end up with higher food production and the same rate of food wastage, resulting in more wasted food overall. Efforts to reduce poverty and food waste, running in parallel are what we need. Articles like these do not help.

In the developing world, most of the food wast that occurs at the source (farm/distribution) is unintentional and would be reduced with better infrastructure, policy, property rights, etc. Building a modern cold-storage warehouse in these locations is not a solution!

I was being somewhat tongue in cheek. I’m not actually saying that “expensive food” should be a goal.

I was simply trying to point out that it’s ridiculous to complain about food waste without doing anything to change a system that incentivises massive overproduction.

You'd also disproportionately impact the poorest people in any given area where the cost of food increased.

Why are so many things that have such a high environmental cost (water, gasoline, food, etc...) so heavily subsidized to the point where gross waste is inherent?

Because that having necessities like water, food and transportation be cheap enough that even the poors can buy enough to meet their needs is a net positive to the quality of life of a society. The trade-off is that makes them cheap enough to waste to varying degrees.

This sounds like the food version of the solutions NIMBYs propose for housing costs.

"housing is expensive because of all the skilled workers moving to SF? The solution is obviously to block all new office construction so companies move elsewhere!"

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