If your daily meal is mostly rice with some vegetables, then cutting down on production means famine.
If your daily meat is processed meat, then cutting down on production means slaughtering the animal stock and processing the soy/corn/etc for human consumption.
It's also good that in the northern hemisphere, where most people live, we can still choose what crops to prioritize for the 2020 harvest; there's some lock-in with specialized hardware and availability of seed stock, but in general we can adapt quite a lot still.
RE: China, last I read, China is nominally food secure - produce enough calories to feed everyone domestically on basic staples. There's also massive waste and spoilage in the supply chain. I don't predict a famine, or 5 missing meals to revolution, but shortage of luxury items is probably expected.
That said, global food supply shortage/shock due to everyone adjusting to COVID is definitely "the cure is worse than the disease" scenario.
I think the US is going to learn why it’s dangerous to centralize food supply. Most of the local farmers in my region (upstate ny) are bankrupt, and much of our production or processing of food is from far away. The half and half from my grocer is processed in Virginia.
A big chunk of US rail traffic demand over the last decade has been oil, which was already dropping as pipeline construction caught up with demand under the new administration's pipeline policies.
(Tangent: For those not familiar, check out Buffet's meeting/deal with Obama admin re: pipeline policy after Berkshire picked up UP stock for cheap.)
The railroads enjoyed a virtual monopoly on additional oil transport capacity for years, but I suspect the latest drop in oil demand might signal the last element needed to completely end that era.
If true, then they might see a slight/temp bump in rail demand in a few months as petroleum storage fills up, when tanker cars are repositioned as a last resort storage option for over-supply.
Point being, the abrupt drop in rail traffic likely has more to do with the drop in oil demand than grain or any other rail transported product.
Which you could still ultimately blame on covid, but it's not necessarily representative of a collapse in multiple markets. Just oil trimming the excess.
At least where I come from, most local farmers can't "go bankrupt" as they are family businesses and have very low operating costs - worst case is sitting idle at home.
Then there's "family farming", where you have a fleet of GPS-and-climate-control-equipped John Deere's on finance and invest heavily in automated irrigation and sell to wholesalers who provide to national chains.
The former are probably fine. The latter, who provide food for the country, are generally running on huge credit lines with payments to meet and in uncertain times like this can (and regularly do) very quickly go bankrupt.
Agriculture is considered essential infrastructure in the US and not stopped. Except they can't get immigrant labor but that is a problem for the small vegetable farmers who don't need or buy the expensive equipment anyway.
Between trade policies (Canadian onion farmers, for example, are importing subsidized onions for 25% of the production cost) and the federal government no longer enforcing anti-trust law (groups of grocery wholesalers are now colluding to set prices via reverse auctions) this is one of the most bleak periods for farmers in the last century.
Other operations are like tenant farmers. Chicken producers are a great example of that. They basically own risk.
Many businesses operate on the edge or need lines of credit that may or may not continue to exist.
The exception is rich hobby farmers who have no need to make a profit and some specialty crops.
I had naively assumed (in the US) that agriculture and rail would be considered essential industries and continue as usual? Is this all due to migrant labor issues?
As our muscles atrophy, basal metabolic rates will decrease too.
Undetermined what kind of hit to population COVID will cause, but I'm estimating <1%.
Maybe in the west, but not the case in China, food is relatively expensive, so very little is wasted, even poisonous rice can find snack factory buyers. Restaurant waste is colleted by small pig farms.
I wonder whether people will decide to take their chances with the coronavirus if faced with famine?
Something tells me that people will risk it with the coronavirus rather than die of starvation.
I’m not saying we can’t live without money, or anything like that. But modern society strongly relies on complex economies for even basic functions like food supply.
The health of that economy can be roughly measured using GDP, a significant drop in GDP (such as a depression) strongly suggest that economy isn’t healthy, and then the basics (like food) stop working.
Unfortunately plenty of people already rely on food banks to avoid starvation. You can’t feed an entire country like that.
The short version of the above is at the extreme you can either risk it with coronavirus (~1%-10% death rate depending on the health of your heathcare system), or in the long term risk it with starvation (guaranteed to kill you).
So yes, at certain point risking widespread infection becomes preferable to economic collapse.
> But modern society strongly relies on complex economies for even basic functions like food supply.
This is as true as it is stupid.
> The health of that economy can be roughly measured using GDP
I would argue that if you have to depend on others you are not fit enough. You do want efficiency but not to the point where it dramatically eats into your resilience.
> Unfortunately plenty of people already rely on food banks to avoid starvation. You can’t feed an entire country like that.
It wouldn't be pretty but agriculture employs amazingly few people, we makes a lot of luxury products we don't need and we feed a lot to our cows, pigs and chickens. If it is impossible or not will depend on administrative tasks/logistics/bean counting. I could see us screw that up tho.
No, moving the right "papers" with high speed has made a serious difference.
If you only knew how many sleep-less nights this has given me for the past 12 years... its terrifying when you add that to the massive amount of misdirected and misallocated time and resources (emergence of SJW, cancel culture Internet trolling, Social Media flexing etc...).
I seriously hoped we had made more progress in fully automated planting/harvesting systems by now--progress has been made, but as seen in this article the Human element is still the bottle-neck/PoF in the system.
Saying "no one wants to die, stop being greedy!" as if you can eliminate all deaths through a simple action is a nice low effort slogan that doesn't make any sense in the real world.
The unpleasant part is not solely people dying, it's the volunteering of other people dying by people who assume they won't die from it, and not for their own survival but to keep a level of personal comfort and luxury.
Assume you are in the group who would die, but economic sacrifice keeps you alive. Now, hands up if you are willing to trade that - to definitely die in April 2020, or suicide today, to prop the world GDP up for a few minutes. What, nobody?
Now assume instead that you're definitely in the group who will be unemployed and bankrupted by the economic costs, but you get to survive COVID-19 and do whatever you can to survive after. Hands up if you would prefer this to the guaranteed death situation? What is that, basically everybody with their hands up?
If you don't believe in the importance of GDP enough to die for it, only enough to support others dying for it, perhaps you really have different motives to the ones you're saying.
For example, in 2010 US unemployment briefly grew about 6% to a total of 10% in the US and there were 40,000 additional deaths from cancer alone[1]. When you consider heart disease, other illness, drug abuse, and suicide, the numbers are much greater. The often cited number of 40k for each percent unemployment may not be far off if these factors are taken together. We may have already volunteered hundreds of thousands of Americans to die from the economic fallout. If food scarcity becomes and issue, we may have already volunteered millions in the 3rd world to starve to death...
I'm not saying that I know what the correct choice is here, but it isn't as simple as saving lives vs GDP.
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
This trend also holds true in the OECD where social programs are more common because there are still budgetary constraints on centralized healthcare. Here is a Meta-analysis showing that the risk of death was 63% higher among those who experienced unemployment in the US AND Europe
Does it have to be "GDP falls and nothing can change to respond to that"?
The UDSA says[1] the United States wastes 30-40% of its food each year - $100+Billion. This ought to mean the food supply could contract 30% and it would be conceivable for nobody to eat less at all, not even go hungry and save money not buying food to throw it in the trash. Most people are overweight, it ought to be possible that the food supply could contract a lot more than 30% for a short period, and not only could it still be enough food to keep everyone alive, many people would get healthier from it happening. Currently the poor would starve and the rich would thrive, but surely that isn't the only way things could be? It's imaginable that a skilled orator could convince people to not spend $100Bn on food to throw in the trash, but to donate it to disease response instead - that's the entire UK NHS budget for many months. That won't apply in developing countries, but plants don't have COVID-19, nor do most humans, and most humans who do, recover. Food scarcity issues are still going to be about resource distribution and logistics, not about actual scarcity of food; not trivial problems which can change with the snap of the fingers, but easier than raising the dead, aren't they?
And even, even, if you don't like being alive in a poorer world, and wish you had died of COVID-19 instead, you can still suicide then, it isn't either-or. But you can't go the other way, regret dying of COVID-19 and then choose to try the alternative problems instead.
>And even, even, if you don't like being alive in a poorer world, and wish you had died of COVID-19 instead, you can still suicide then, it isn't either-or. But you can't go the other way, regret dying of COVID-19 and then choose to try the alternative problems instead.
I am in no way concerned about the outcome for myself of my immediate family. We are extremely low risk, have secure income, and savings in cash. I fully expect we will come out of this event better than we went in. In fact, the harder the crash, the better off we will likely be. That said, there are billions (literally) of people on this planet which were struggling and often failing to meet their basic health and nutritional needs. We should be mind be mindful of how our response will impact them.
On to the rest of your comments, I see two main points. please let me know if I misstated them.
1) Covid deaths today are irreversible, future deaths can be mitigated
I agree with this in principle, but in practice I am much more pessimistic that societies will mitigate the 2nd order effects of our response. People are notably bad at balancing highly visible costs today, with less visible and costs in the future. Societies could have come together with radical mitigations to reduce deaths from the 2009 global recession or any of the famines in recent decades[1], but they didn't because they were far away and not obvious.
If I were to summarize my main point, it is that we need to have the right stakeholders considering the long and short term perspective crafting our response to this pandemic, and economic considerations are a valid part of minimizing the overall death toll. Doctors have moral obligation to look out for the best interests of their patients and do not take economic considerations into account, nor should they. We don't want them to decide if the cost of a cancer medication could be better spent feeding the poor, but that doesn't mean the tradeoff doesn't exist.
When deciding how to manage this epidemic, doctors, economists, actuaries, and politicians all need to be involved in crafting the response. In order to minimize the death toll, you need to make accurate predictions of outcome and human behavior. Over-optimism or over-pessimism will lead to more deaths.
2) Existing food waste can be repurposed to feed the poor.
I wholeheartedly agree that food scarcity issues are still going to be about resource distribution and logistics. There will not be widespread famine in the US or UK, but there could be in poor food importing countries sub-Saharan Africa or parts of Asia. Plants will grow and food will be still produced in other countries, but if their economies tank, they will not have the money to buy it.
3) Solving these problems later is easier than raising the dead.
It all depends on how likely you think the solutions are and the death toll for each. If you risk 2 people tomorrow to save 1 more today, your solutions needs to be 50-50 to break even. There is obviously a point where this tradeoff results in more lost lives unless you believe you must always act to save every person you can today.
The danger of the pandemic is that it can grow much bigger if we fail to throttle it. But when the number of daily deaths from the pandemic will stabilize at some low enough level, or, better yet, will be falling with time, people will again consider the risk acceptable, and will go on with their lives and further pursuit of happiness, not mere survival.
Yesterday 520 people have died because of bat-flu.
Not sure why I'm getting downvoted. Food takes months to grow and needs to be harvested within a short window. By the time people realize there's a famine coming it will be too late. Just look at how we could have prepared in January for this virus if people weren't so shortsighted.
There won't be any sources for a while because this is literally just starting.
I mean 3billion people are on lockdown of some sort globally right now. Not hard to imagine it may be hard for workers to get to farms across borders, or even within borders. CA alone will probably see a shortage of migrants. No, I don't know for sure but I'm speculating that it's quite likely.
Supply chains have also been strained because people have been panic buying for what, 3 weeks now? You can't just snap your fingers and double your supply of vegetables.
Even if you do nothing the market will probably fix it: Less food in the markets > high demand drives up prices > higher salaries > slightly lower prices
At some point some people are hungry enough to get a... shall we say... real job?
With some regulatory sanity we subsidize it a bit.
Perhaps we should test and quarantine the farm workers when money stops being an issue.
Especially with anti-price-gouging laws - this process is explicit forbidden from happening during a crisis.
Also, its also not that simple as stated by op.
Its also a supply chain issue. Which could be worse than anything else.
Drivers getting sick. Cargo ship captains getting sick etc etc etc.
Stuff might stop coming even if available in China.
How do you repair your farmers tech? Especially sometimes it is licked behind a paywall, where you cant just use any wheel. It must be from company xxx.
We will find out soon that those paywalls will cause real real real world issues
[1] https://www.agriculture.com/markets/newswire/update-1-kazakh...
Either way I would bet that with millions out of work unable to pay rent a backbreaking job sounds better than nothing. Especially if so much food is at stake send in the national guard if can't get enough bodies.
Visa's stopped: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/03/18/seasonal-...
Restrictions Eased (yesterday): https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-further-eases-curbs-on-seas...
Desperate and hungry people will be resourceful, but it likely won't be as simple as a lower grade of corn in the produce section of the grocery store.
Failing to do so would take a huge number of people whose job description is to do exactly that. If one tries something new that works the rest is sure to follow.
They are puzzling all the time, how much eggs to buy? how much potatoes? how much this? how much that? They never get it exactly right, they are always a few bags of apples short or have to throw them out.
I'm presuming regulations wouldn't be updated/waived quickly enough (for feed grade produce, etc), which is part of why famines of this level come to be in the first place.
It's not that stores wouldn't buy it or be willing to sell it, but that companies are much less likely to go against regulations than an individual, even in times of distress.
And to get to grocery store shelves, a product has to go through the hands of multiple companies, depending on level of refinement. But probably at least a producer, a wholesaler/packing house, a distributer, and at least three transport companies. All of which would need to be willing to take the risk of breaking regulations. Which is normally a good thing, since it keeps our food supply chain safe.
It's part of why EPA/USDA/FDA/etc regulations focus on what companies are allowed to grow or manufacture or sell, instead of what consumers are allowed to buy.
So what you're describing is true, but if we're talking about normally illegal-to-sell-food, depends on many people deciding to flout regulations.
This is all in addition to any rationing or other emergency rules that might be put in place (like attempts at government controlled distribution, ala Venezuela)
[1] https://twitter.com/laurie_garrett/status/122072527639456563...
So, at any normal day, China would've been eating 30-32% of world's food by value, while producing 20% of it by itself.
Agriculture has been on shutdown for the past 2.5 months. Farms have slaughtered a large portion of their livestock, and a big portion of the seedstock has been used for food in the last few months too.
Chinese national reserves were said to be able to keep the country going for 3 months under a strict rationing regime, which we haven't seen, but at least we know by many accounts that meat reserves have been released all across China with no restraint.
Now try guessing how much of it left.
P.S. On ports. I initially wrote them being shut down, I correct that they are facing major disruption, with a lot of ships missing their berthing timeslots
Even looking at AIS you can see 1000+ dockings over the next 3 days at Shenzhen - https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/data/?asset_type=arrivals_d...
Also air freight volume is off the charts! We’re starting to see airlines use their 777’s with cargo in the belly and boxes on the seats.
I can’t speak to the food security situation at all. However, from my vantage point, supply lanes are screamingly full of something.
How that plays out for individual products ... shrug ...
Yes, after resumption of commercial activities, air freight was record cheap for a few weeks, than it was hit again by airport closures.
Now I got news that SZ airport will be reopening again for freight only flights under some special regime
As for ports, we have a container stuck in Yantian since Feb 14, no news from the shipper when they can load. The freight broken says the shipping company says the ship is there moored, but they have no permission berth or to do anything besides pass instant noodles to the crew.
Yeah, it's best to say we are having a monumental pileup that is continuing since the spring festival
References? And of course, that is by value... I’m in NZ and it’s been in the news about how our our crayfish (lobster in US) exports to China crashed, but that’s a high value food. China imports a lot of “unnecessary” luxury foods from NZ (deer, fruit, salmon, mussels, etc), although I don’t know anything about volumes of staples like wheat.
I have only heard of kiwifruit going unharvested. We’ll all soon know (if product has no coolstores, and assuming farm to supermarket delay is about a week).
Crayfish is crawfish in the US, not lobster
There are some giant crayfishes in Australia. Much bigger than the standard old world crayfishes. Some (Cherax) can be raised in captivity and are very similar to lobsters in size and color, except that they are non marine.
Closing sea ports should not to be a problem for those species at short term (as long as there are reserves of crayfish food remaining of course).
Edit: the dictionary says langoustine are another species, although one of the joys of English is making it mean what you want!
Can you explain that in more relevant terms? AFAIK agriculture has been shut down in the US for the past 2.5 months as well (actually more like past 5-6 months), simply because it's not the growing season.
What are the different growing seasons in China, for different kinds of crops?
Compounding the matter is the party bureaucracy effectively killed most small farms since villages were completed sealed off, chickens weren't allowed to be sold (or killed in fear of bird flu) and feeds can't be sent in.
The pork shortage drove the chicken market to overheat last year and just right when they were suffering from oversupply during the winter this virus hit. Double whammy.
Absolutely not true. Weather/environmental issues have created many famines throughout history.
Just an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
I don't think it's true historically, but it may well be true in the modern age. Agricultural productivity has far outpaced population growth, and our crops are much more resilient to weather and pest issues than in the past.
However, distribution is extremely inefficient, especially over large geographical distances. This is how we get significant percentages of all food thrown away, while at the same time having hundreds of millions of starving people or near-starving all over the world.
China has done a massive livestock slaughter campaign when the quarantine was declared. That has actually depressed the food prices quite a bit for the first months, but after that, the prices have shot up. This is how they got that much meat: https://mustsharenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Wuhan-R...
The scariest part of it is that China relies ENORMOUSLY on the imported food, despite accounting for more than 20% of global food production.
The government has expected to shut everything down, including food production, and weather the crisis by relying on the remaining food in the supply chain. China has spent a big portion of its national food reserve too: https://pbs.twimg.com/ext_tw_video_thumb/1220714156753653760...
They planned to restock quickly with overseas imports after the lockdown was to be lifted. Now that overseas supply is a big question mark...
I heard the same is going in much of the world. Agricultural business is facing shutdown, and they are cashing out their livestock, seedstock, and trying to get an early harvest done before the lockdowns hit their countries.
And people were saying that we will never see a famine in Asia in the 21st century. That optimism was premature...