Re:South Korea: The only middle power of its kind
by throaway3141593 on Tuesday August 03, 2021 @06:51PM
(#28055235)
> 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.
Re:South Korea: The only middle power of its kind
by fleddr on Tuesday August 03, 2021 @07:28PM
(#28055519)
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.
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.