• uralsolo [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Farmers putting the entire food supply at risk by growing nothing but cash crops is the ur-inefficiency of market based production. There are probably Babylonian tablets complaining about a shortage of cereals because everyone tried to grow dates instead.

      • zifnab25 [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        I don’t know if it ever meaningfully ate into the supply of arable land, but the tulip speculation must certainly incentivized a whole bunch of farmers to plant additional tulips (or, at least, claim to do so) for the purpose of cashing in on the bubble.

      • TheLastHero [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Not in their lovely, white, European metropole of course, but in their colonies in Indonesia (Dutch East Indies), the Dutch would rip up food crops and force villagers to plant cash crops instead as part of their “Cultivation System” (Cultuurstelsel)

        Instead of land taxes, 20% of village land had to be devoted to government crops for export or, alternatively, peasants had to work in government-owned plantations for 60 days of the year. To allow the enforcement of these policies, Javanese villagers were more formally linked to their villages and were sometimes prevented from traveling freely around the island without permission. As a result of this policy, much of Java became a Dutch plantation. Some remarks while in theory only 20% of land were used as export crop plantation or peasants have to work for 66 days, in practice they used more portions of lands (same sources claim nearly reach 100%) until native populations had little to plant food crops which result famine in many areas and, sometimes, peasants still had to work more than 66 days.

    • Alaskaball [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      3rd horseman of the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse from the book of Revelations is commonly called Famine, but he specifically does NOT blight crops, does not damage food. His weapon is the scales, and “destroys” not by weather or worm, but market manipulation.

      In a world where food is more than abundant, the only reason why a person would starve to death is because it’s unprofitable to save human lives.

      3 year throwback post referencing the grapes of Wrath quote

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      It’s one of America’s primary weapons. We dump corn on a region until all the local food producing farmers are driven under, then the region has no choice but to import. And sometimes, whoopsie, we decide we want to use the corn for some other awful product, and people starve.

      • autismdragon [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        There’s a moment from “Fed Up” that I’m absolutely obsessed with for some reason that this reminds me of. (AutiADHD moment).

        Bill Clinton is one of the interviewees in it, and at one point he’s talking about corn syrup, and pauses to say in the mostly faux-folksy way imaginable “which I don’t think is a good use of corn”. Idk why but it just stuck in my head.