Given that the primary goal of farming is to feed people, why not? USDA was created by President Lincoln and was critical to ensuring food distribution throughout the Great Depression. Which agency is better equipped to handle this responsibility than Ag?

It already is. The Food and Drug Administration exists. There are countless laws that dictate everything from how crops are. grown to how animals are treated to how products are labeled. Moreover, the government purchases enormous quantities of food and distributes it for the military as well as being involved in everything from food stamps to the famed "welfare cheese" strategic food reserve issues.

Now, it's true that the government isn't in control of literally every aspect of food distribution, but they definitely do things to ensure a stable food supply for the country at reasonable prices. (And then there are the billions and billions in farmer subsidies etc.)

It isn't, having worked in both Agriculture and Culinary in 11 countries spanning two continents, and 2 islands I think my position is far more informed than your own and perhaps even those stats you have given as it only gives averages.

Context: I also have a background in logistics and supply chains at VW and BMW, and I can tell you that any Industry losing UPWARDS of 40% of all product from start to end (even more when viewing farm to end consumer depending on distribution channels) and accepts that loss is utterly doomed--the monetary losses are masked in murky mix of poverty and subsidies.

There are many challenges with having a global food supply system, some that we will have to radically alter or abandon altogether, which are mainly environmental in the best of times and scarcity ridden disasters and Humanitarian crises in the worst. I've seen it occur in Egypt, Somalia, Tunisia, Ukraine, Venezuela and had interactions with people on the ground as it happen or that lived through it themselves and we later worked together.

Its easy to dismiss when food is so plentiful at the shops, but this is actually why I went to IBM to go into their Food Safety program and left when I realized it was just vapourware.

I understood that it only takes very simple variable changes to alter the very delicate and fragile system we have in place that we all rely on. There is a massive opportunity loss in not addressing this on so many levels, but even the glaring monetary one seems to go past unappreciated despite the fact that Agriculture is the biggest Industry in the World only second to FOREX, and mainly because FOREX includes the transactions within International Ag supply chains.

Consider also that less 1.7% of the World's population feeds the other ~98% and things start to sink in really fast. The 'technical-debt' like issues with specialty crops that only grow in one specific area (almonds in Central CA is one example) rather than having several cultivars throughout the World are disasters waiting to happen. I'm not sure if its by design or sheer ignorance anymore, as some to profit from either scenario but either way it needs to be resolved.

I'm glad you guys have taken so much interest in this subject, as its a personal passion of mine; I will go thoroughly in all the responses, and please engage if you want to discuss the matter further as I welcome more discussion to get people involved as this is not only a dire problem, but its ultimately a solvable optimization issue given enough focus. And I think tech people are what are needed most, on a calories basis we've already reached a post-scarcity situation in food production already.

> No system is perfectly efficient, and while there are improvements to be made - it is pretty damn amazing that the majority of 7

Agreed, I would go so far as to say its a modern working miracle it does yield that result when you see its inherit flaws we seem to willfully neglect because it doesn't affect +98% of thew World's population, and have gone into detail before why that is in other posts. On the other end of that equation for the farmers is often poverty and suicide.

Feeding people can be done in many areas. Why should one area sacrifice a limited resource when another area can do the same but with more of that resource? If they aren't compensated for the sacrifice of that resource, there is no reason for that resource to be sacrificed. Charity to big business will lead to being left destitute.

This is not the case in the US where millions of people don't have convenient access to food.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

Are you sure about that? Intuitively I would expect commercially-produced food is far more efficient than everyone growing tiny amounts on a balcony.

It does bother me

These are all kind of bad examples, but I'll go with this one. Food takes time to grow or produce, so you have to accurately predict months out how much food you can sell. So, who is to blame for imperfect predictions of future demand? We could donate all this food instead of just binning it, so then who's to blame for not building the mass infrastructure required to coordinate such distribution, and then running it all for free? And then if such an individual did do this, why didn't they spend their considerable resources instead on a project that could have benefited humanity way more?

The land it's farmed on has inherent value to someone; there's no amount of labor cost reduction or automation that can bring food costs below the value of the land + whatever raw materials go into production (seed, feed, whatever).

> Industrialization and the Green Revolution have made food so plentiful, we can have foods from all over the world available to us at any time of year.

And yet people starve all over the place; not just in 3rd world countries but here in the USA. So either it's not that plentiful or we have a serious logistical problem.

Why are you confident that having fewer humans would help with the standard of living? Doesn't most of the scarcity of what we consume come from the labor necessary to produce it, rather than the cost of physical stuff?

With food for example, for every dollar you spend on food only about 15 cents is actually buying food items from the farmer and the rest of it goes it to the work of processing, packaging, transporting, selling, servicing, etc

(https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-dollar-series/do...)

With fewer people, those things become even more scarce.

> Of course not. This experiment has been tried with horribly deadly results.

I assume you're referencing famines in communist countries, etc. In those instances, the government had a monopoly on food growth and distribution.

Your example is irrelevant because the USPS is just one of numerous mail carriers (UPS, FedEx, etc).

This strikes me as the ideal state of affairs, if we don't overproduce food a below average crop would mean people starving.

so the privately owned farm that grew your food is such a terrible idea...who knew?

Yes? Most people who have ever lived have always produced their own food. That most of us in the developed world have lost the ability to do so—and that access to the physical essence of our being is dependent on monetary transactions with faceless entities that value profit above human life—seems deeply alienating.

Inflation is far beyond what most can comprehend.

Would this still be a problem if we didn’t use most of our agricultural land to grow crops to feed to the animals we eat? It’s very inefficient to feed plants to cows and then eat the cow.

food scarcity in America is not a problem. Then you have logistical challenge to transfer this food to other region and efficiently distribute it. Then you have financial problem who will pay for all of this.

Here is an idea: Move food subsidies from farming industry to people needing it.

Now people needing it most can afford non-crappy food. And industry have to care about wasting now-not-so-cheap food.

The world we live in, yes.

> But this is also why a purely free-market approach doesn't functionally work in many cases. This problem is solvable by government intervention.

Sure, or we might end up growing the wrong crops per government order and experience massive starvation all across the country. I hope you like potatoes!