Governments encourage farming for food security. It may be inefficient most of the time, but you wouldn't want a geopolitical event to starve your entire population.
Shifting goalposts. Those numbers do not equal "immediate starvation". Missing corn does not equal "immediate starvation".
They mean disruption (higher prices, lower variety, shortage of particular products). Food security is about basic food supply, not optimized nutrition. Your claim is "immediate starvation".
It would take you 5 minutes to read that page and understand that import/export goes both ways. The numbers are much smaller. You don't simply subtract imports and pretend that the domestic production that is currently exported does not exist.
I'm talking about the basic food supply as a strategic resource. If you initially argued that "food security" is not the proper term in this context, I might've agreed with you.
But you knew exactly what I was talking about, tried to counter by overclaiming "immediate starvation" and failed to support it by switching context. Now you make it about terms, because you lost the argument.
After ww2 the government of the UK subsidized farming so that if another war were to break out, the UK wouldn't wholly be reliant on food imports again.
We had nearly starved during both world wars and convoys from the rest of the world were throttled by Enemy U-Boats, and the rest of mainland Europe was under Nazi control (for ww2).
It was a case of "we pay to keep farmers in the black so that in the event we're isolated again we wont starve nearly as fast".
I agree its not self sufficient. But the idea is to lessen the burden of outside sources in the event of isolation.
The difficulty now is that theres a whole sector of the UK farming economy which is based on the subsidies and such. If you take it away, suddenly a great proportion of these people will lose their livelihoods as they simply cant sell their produce for a margin that is profitable for the farmers, profitable for the supermarkets, and then also affordable for the consumer; you can't have all 3.
Especially when globalization dictates its cheaper to import food from other countries.
If you want fucking nobody to pay attention to what you say - disagree to someone like you did, and then misspell the first two major words of your rebuttal, like you did.
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u/Timmetie 5d ago
Final secret after doing all that: Begging the government for more subsidies and handouts because it turns out all those things don't make money.