Don’t almost all governments subsidize the hell out of their agriculture because it hasn’t been profitable since like… 1800s?
The USA spent ~$25,000,000,000 on crop subsidies. Particularly on the big 4-5 staples. That’s not exactly chump change. We actually spend ~$1,000,000,000,000 on food in general.
Not to mention the “subsidy” that farmers themselves received via land grants in the past, often passed forward to today’s farmers (those who haven’t sold to larger companies).
One of the craziest things to me is that the land used for farming is worth a lot more if you choose to and are able to use it for something else. There’s an opportunity cost that only exists because these folks didn’t factor today’s price of land in to their equation as a cost.
Governments subsidize agriculture because the market would leave a huge gaping hole in national security if it were unsubsidised.
Yeah that sucks, but in most communist countries that exist or have existed… don’t people just starve en masse?
Capitalism is morally bankrupt, but it prevents more famine (within its borders) than it causes
The cias own data on the ddr disproves this.
Oh I mean we can trust the cia, sure.
Lemme see a link :)
Who knows why they released it. It was averaged across all Soviet citizens, not just the ddr.
I mean this is just for the ssr, which is by far the most successful example of a communist power.
But most current and past communist countries famously have famines.
I’m almost 100% that it was an average but even so. May I see the famines?
The whole doc is talking about the caloric intake of a Soviet citizen
That’s what made me think it was across the whole Soviet Union. The cia was usually pretty specific about what particular soviet they meant because their data would be used in operations against those particular states.
So two from checks notes 80 years ago in regions that experienced famine every 10 years and never experienced famine again, one literally caused by a us blockade and one caused by a us blockade and a catastrophic flood that hit 30% of the country.
When I get back to the computer we can compare that to the famines experienced by capitalist countries during the same period.
Regardless, the suggestion that communism is somehow fundamentally bound to malnutrition is ahistorical.
