China seeks food security, but at what cost?
China seeks food security, but at what cost?
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dutch devoting 100% of arable land to tulip futures
spoiler
probably didn't happen but what if it did
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.
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.
This is so cruel and I will talk with my students about it in time.
Ugh. Just had to do some bureaucracy hell to get an id and the whole time i was thinking id is just a weapon the state uses to control and exploit you.
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.
"Capitalism breeds innovation"
-Ea-Nāṣir
I want this inscribed on a shitty copper ingot that somehow is hurtling through the front window of the chamber of commerce at 32mph.
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.
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.