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Comment by jsbisviewtiful | Hacker News Reader

> Will a billion people die? Probably not

Really underestimating the amount of deaths that will occur when our food production systems start collapsing.

In the US, our domestic food production has started collapsing thanks to the massive deportations of farm workers. According to various reports, a tremendous amount of food went to waste in the fields last summer because farmers couldn't get workers to harvest it.

Sure, but a big part of the reason for that is that we produce a huge surplus of food, so food prices are extremely low compared to how wealthy the US is. That means wages for farm workers are too low for typical Americans to want to do the job.

If our food production goes down significantly, that will raise prices which will let wages for farm workers rise to the point where more people will be willing to do the job. Will it be unpleasant? Sure, but not to the point of famine, we'll just go back to spending a larger portion of our household budgets on food like we used to fifty years ago.

Yeah, that's a common myth. How much would you have to be paid to work 8 to 12-hour days bent over in the sun, with minimal water, and with exposure to pesticides and herbicides? Spotty bathroom access and few breaks?

A common theme found in various sources about using American labor in the fields is that American laborers are too slow, damage too much produce, and don't show up after a couple days. Another common theme is that immigrant labor works hard and uses their resources to ensure their children don't do the same work.

A study that attempts to quantify the damage done by ICE enforcement actions. https://arxiv.org/html/2508.03787v1#:~:text=The%202025%20ICE...

Interview with a farmer and his experience of the impact of ICE actions, the farming life, and produce economics.

https://www.thepacker.com/news/industry/some-farms-may-not-r...

First of all, many of those conditions can be improved. 12 hour days, minimal water, lack of bathroom, few breaks are imposed by employers trying to squeeze as much out of as few workers as possible. More people would be willing to do the job at maybe 25% cost to make conditions better.

It my late thirties, I wouldn't do the job because I have better options, but when I was high school or college age I would have killed to do that job if it was paying $30 (in 2025 dollars)/hour. My dad literally did that type of job for a while in his younger years.

Will that raise prices of food? Absolutely, but we're talking about going back to 1950s prices relative to wage, not about famine.

ICE enforcement and immigration laws are also a choice. We can change those if we need to.

During some of the worst starvation events in the 20th century, it was still only on the order of ~10 million people that died. And most of those deaths were because horrific totalitarian governments prevented outside aid to the affected regions.

I have not seen evidence that there will be food system collapse driven by climate change that would be worse than those events, but my ears are open if you have some.

There is one absolutely massive one, and that's that for the first time the problem is truly global. Other famines have been caused either by war or local droughts, both of which affect only a population in a limited area and crucially, can be somewhat mitigated by importing food from elsewhere. You can't import food if there are global food shortages.

> I have not seen evidence that there will be food system collapse driven by climate change that would be worse than those events

Doing my best to not come off condescending here in case you are being sincere, but the comparison of totalitarian gov crackdowns and local drought are not exactly comparable to an almost worldwide heat increase and less water availability for key high density areas... Once countries have to start hoarding their resources and other countries run out of resources, things will not be good and there's plenty of data, studies and articles out there discussing this that are not hard to find.

If you are being sincere, apologies, but living in the US lately has shown a level of bad actors trying to grift that's made it really difficult to be patient with climate change denial/dismissiveness.

If you think that these very vague suggestions come across as some sort of strong critique of me, don't worry. I don't think you have provided any sort of refutation of me, and you certainly do not exhibit much understanding of what, say, 2 degrees of change will looks like.

If you have any papers, please share. If you have sections of the IPCC to point to, please share. I am very sincere, in all my comments. But if you can't point to actual scientific documents, then you're doing no better than the climate denialists.

Took 2 minutes of Googling and little effort to provide these 2 of 10+ articles that immediately popped up. So, you are fully aware you could have found these easily but were putting out "pRoVe It" energy for whatever reason.

https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/climate-change-cuts...

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2018/07/25/climate-change-...

> “If the climate warms by 3 degrees, that’s basically like everyone on the planet giving up breakfast.” That’s a high cost for a world where more than 800 million people at times go a day or more without food because of inadequate access.

The numbers in those articles are exactly in line with everything I have ever seen on the topic. That you think they contradict what I'm saying makes me think that either you're completely misreading me or the articles.

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