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Comment by _RPL5_ | Hacker News Reader

"well developed economically (punching far above its tiny weight)"

I am being a nitpicker here, but I think there is no correlation between country size and level of economic development. Many of the richest polities in the world are quite small. Places like Singapore & HK come to mind.

I think bigger countries, even if they are "1st world," can sometimes look rather rough, because there is a lot of variation between different regions / municipalities / neighborhoods. It can be surreal sometimes, but it is what it is.

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I should perhaps clarify that it's not just the level of economic development, rather specifically it's scale.

For example, would you expect the Netherlands, smaller than a typical US state, to be the world's #2 food exporter? From a tiny country that is also extremely densely populated?

To produce a number of mega corporations like Unilever, Shell (partly dutch), Philips, Heineken, the like...and this doesn't even begin to describe lesser known companies in extremely heavy transport, water management, mega scale infrastructure.

Combined with the extremely favorable location of being a distribution hub (Rotterdam), indeed similar to Singapore.

So I basically agree, it doesn't require a large country to produce a lot of economic output. Yet I'd still say the food export fact is a crazy one, as you would expect that to very much be surface-related.

> Yet I'd still say the food export fact is a crazy one, as you would expect that to very much be surface-related.

I would expect food production to be area-related. Rotterdam is Europe's busiest seaport, and one of the busiest seaports in the world, so I'm not the least bit surprised that the Netherlands is one of the world's top food exporters.

Perhaps you mean to imply that the bulk of this export is just throughput or transport. A lot of it is real produce, coming from the country itself:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/holland-...

Which of course is surface-related, so the remarkable/surprising fact is the intensity of it, and the stunning yields.

"Feeding the world" from a very small surface and with very little human labor is quite a marvel. I think any farmer, from any other country in the world, will have their minds blown when they see it with their own eyes.

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