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screambirdscreaming:
screambirdscreaming:
screambirdscreaming:
I’m still trying to write this damn essay on food systems but I’m very tired and at this point I mostly just feel like screaming about how fucked up and bizarre and unethical it is to treat food as an economic commodity??
It’s bad for farmers, whose livelihood rests on a knife’s edge that is unlikely to survive as little as two years of bad luck
Which then also forces farmers to make decisions about land use, crop rotation, pesticide and fertilizer use, etc. which are motivated by an economic bottom line, rather than by what’s good for the land or the environment
It’s bad for grocery stores, which run on a likewise terrible profit margin because they have to waste a massive amount of food as a consequence of having everything avaliable all the time (eg, the only way to guarantee always having apples is to always have more apples than you can sell, so you never sell out, which means some will go bad and be wasted)
Which is Also bad for the environment, bc it means production must be accelerated even more than the actual need for food would demand
It’s bad for people who eat food, aka everyone, because being able to eat well becomes a cost-based luxury and people’s ability to take care of themselves food-wise becomes subject to a whole crapfuck of market forces that are beyond their control
It’s bad not just locally, but globally, as the stability of local food systems everywhere is destabilized by what happens to be cheap on the global market
And what’s cheap on the global market is grains subsidized by the US government, which in theory gives farm subsidies to try and protect farmers from the issues in point 1, but the subsidies are so badly structured that the vast bulk of the money goes to the people who own corporate megafarms in the midwest, and produce massive quantities of grain which floods the global market and undercuts all other food prices, and actually further destabilizes the farmers even within the US who are most as risk
It’s honestly astonishing we’ve gotten this far down this godforsaken rabbithole but how do we get out
like. The fact that food production - what gets grown, and how much of it - depends on the whims of the fucking market and not what people actually need to eat
is just. so fucked.
It’s difficult to coherently express why the whims of the market are so far diverged from what people actually need, but they really really are.
Basically the whole supply/demand principle only works as advertised if:
-people could do without the commodity in question if it becomes too expensive (thus providing incentive to lower prices so people start buying again)
-every consumer has roughly the same amount of money (otherwise the market responds only to the demands of the wealthy)
-every producer is on roughly equal footing, in terms of the resources they invest in their production (otherwise a wealthy producer can undercut the market to drive others out of business, then raise prices once they control the market)
-things which are being bought and sold retain intrinsic value over time (that is, commodities may devalue but never become worthless)
and… none of those things are true of farming.
The first few are probably intuitive, but to the last one:
Food is in general perishable, so it must be sold while it’s good - there’s no holding out until the market is better. There’s no real-time adjusting to market values either, what’s on the market is however much you grew this year, so any market prediction involved in deciding supply is running at least a year in advance, and in general the factors most strongly effecting the product supply are like. the fucking weather. and not demand at all. Also, there is an amount of food which is the Necessary amount, and any amount over is waste and worthless - because people can only eat so much - while any less is a catastrophe.
There’s a strong pressure to err on the side of producing too much - so you have a safety net if the yield is bad, and so there isn’t mass starvation - but that in itself floods the market with excess and devalues the product (at least from the farmer’s perspective, but the number of price markups that happen throughout processing, distribution, and retail sale bring the price up to the point where food is still often unaffordable even while farmers are going out of business)
It’s all just… shit. Just a total shitshow. Economics just does not work on food production! It just doesn’t!
screambirdscreaming:
screambirdscreaming:
screambirdscreaming:
I’m still trying to write this damn essay on food systems but I’m very tired and at this point I mostly just feel like screaming about how fucked up and bizarre and unethical it is to treat food as an economic commodity??
It’s bad for farmers, whose livelihood rests on a knife’s edge that is unlikely to survive as little as two years of bad luck
Which then also forces farmers to make decisions about land use, crop rotation, pesticide and fertilizer use, etc. which are motivated by an economic bottom line, rather than by what’s good for the land or the environment
It’s bad for grocery stores, which run on a likewise terrible profit margin because they have to waste a massive amount of food as a consequence of having everything avaliable all the time (eg, the only way to guarantee always having apples is to always have more apples than you can sell, so you never sell out, which means some will go bad and be wasted)
Which is Also bad for the environment, bc it means production must be accelerated even more than the actual need for food would demand
It’s bad for people who eat food, aka everyone, because being able to eat well becomes a cost-based luxury and people’s ability to take care of themselves food-wise becomes subject to a whole crapfuck of market forces that are beyond their control
It’s bad not just locally, but globally, as the stability of local food systems everywhere is destabilized by what happens to be cheap on the global market
And what’s cheap on the global market is grains subsidized by the US government, which in theory gives farm subsidies to try and protect farmers from the issues in point 1, but the subsidies are so badly structured that the vast bulk of the money goes to the people who own corporate megafarms in the midwest, and produce massive quantities of grain which floods the global market and undercuts all other food prices, and actually further destabilizes the farmers even within the US who are most as risk
It’s honestly astonishing we’ve gotten this far down this godforsaken rabbithole but how do we get out
like. The fact that food production - what gets grown, and how much of it - depends on the whims of the fucking market and not what people actually need to eat
is just. so fucked.
It’s difficult to coherently express why the whims of the market are so far diverged from what people actually need, but they really really are.
Basically the whole supply/demand principle only works as advertised if:
-people could do without the commodity in question if it becomes too expensive (thus providing incentive to lower prices so people start buying again)
-every consumer has roughly the same amount of money (otherwise the market responds only to the demands of the wealthy)
-every producer is on roughly equal footing, in terms of the resources they invest in their production (otherwise a wealthy producer can undercut the market to drive others out of business, then raise prices once they control the market)
-things which are being bought and sold retain intrinsic value over time (that is, commodities may devalue but never become worthless)
and… none of those things are true of farming.
The first few are probably intuitive, but to the last one:
Food is in general perishable, so it must be sold while it’s good - there’s no holding out until the market is better. There’s no real-time adjusting to market values either, what’s on the market is however much you grew this year, so any market prediction involved in deciding supply is running at least a year in advance, and in general the factors most strongly effecting the product supply are like. the fucking weather. and not demand at all. Also, there is an amount of food which is the Necessary amount, and any amount over is waste and worthless - because people can only eat so much - while any less is a catastrophe.
There’s a strong pressure to err on the side of producing too much - so you have a safety net if the yield is bad, and so there isn’t mass starvation - but that in itself floods the market with excess and devalues the product (at least from the farmer’s perspective, but the number of price markups that happen throughout processing, distribution, and retail sale bring the price up to the point where food is still often unaffordable even while farmers are going out of business)
It’s all just… shit. Just a total shitshow. Economics just does not work on food production! It just doesn’t!
