@WoodsDweller
probably frantically. I don't guarantee you that they are having any success -- I really don't guarantee that they know what they're doing, after so many years of neocon and neolib ideology pushing down into their bureaucracy -- but I guarantee that the organization is populated by people who understand the agency's core mission, which is not, contrary to how it often seems to us corporate-hating anti-fascism folks, to ensure an ever greater concentration of the nation's food production in the hands of an ever smaller number of agribusiness behemoths.

The core mission of the Dept of Ag has been, ever since the Dust Bowl, to ensure that no American ever goes hungry for lack of sufficient calories produced. It was Stalin, of all people, who called the US out on the fact that our people had starved to death during the 30s, and our government could not -- or perhaps simply would not -- even produce a count of the mortality, nevermind avert the famine.

So, yeah, I'm sure they're making plans. Let's just hope those plans bear literal fruit. One thing that does not fill me with confidence is that there is not already in the media, a public information push for the equivalent of Victory Gardens, exhorting people to plant, plant, plant, even as the spring is upon us.

(Note that it's a secondary, but very much less successful, mission to ensure that no American ever goes hungry, full stop -- which is why SNAP is under the auspices of the Dept of Ag, and not Health and Human Services.)

#1
they will put up with almost anything. Quit feeding them and things spiral out of control quickly.
The basic shock absorber in the system is meat production -- if grain production falls short then the price of feed goes up, farmers can't afford to feed their herds and send additional animals to slaughter. Meat supplies go up, prices come down, people shift their diet to eat more meat for a while. Every introductory economics text covers this and it generally works.
Maybe I'm too concerned about just how broken everything is right now. Will this mechanism work in our current environment?
We've introduced another shock absorber in the form of corn ethanol for fuel. That seems to be more for winter blends, so cutting the ethanol requirement now might not help much, but if things look grim in the fall we could waive the ethanol requirements for a year, particularly in light of an oil glut.
What I'm worried about more than anything else is that nobody (and I mean NOBODY) is talking about food supplies. They are fussing about the stock market and rents and mortgages and how soon we can get back to normal. The time to shore up agriculture is right now while we still can. Maybe to the point of making soldiers available to plant strawberries.

@jim p
China is a huge country and the coronavirus was effectively contained within 3 provinces. There were no shortages of basic foods anywhere in the country. During the worst of the pandemic in Jan/Feb the farmers suffered from a lack of migrant farm hands because many had left to go home for the Chinese New Year. The government chartered buses, entire trains and even planes to get them back to work for the April planting season.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_0ndit4GYk]

The country is mostly back at work now.

Getting China back to work

As China’s leadership works to kickstart the economy in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, the country’s provinces are hustling to get folks back to work. Trivium is tracking the official resumption rates throughout the country – to help folks understand what is happening on the ground. New updates every weekday.
...
Key takeaways as of April 2

• The vast majority of businesses in China have at least turned the lights back on – with 94% of large companies having resumed operations.
• 25 provinces are reporting full resumption rates (of between 99-100%) for large businesses. These provinces account for 89.2% of GDP. An additional three provinces have large business resumption rates above 90%. That said, capacity utilization at many of these companies is still closer to 80% of normal levels, with many far below that.
• Overall, then, industrial enterprises appear to be operating at 80.6% of normal activity levels. This is an impressive pace of normalization given that our estimate stood at just 65.3% exactly one month ago.

...

It is estimated that China will take a 2% hit on 2020 GDP - down to 4.5%. One important factor is that over 60% of their GDP is generated within the country. Xi Jinping has said that he would create huge infrastructure projects to keep unemployment to a minimum if global sales tank.

#3 always vet a source.

Still, not hard to believe food production would degrade in China and really, everywhere. So that's a real concern.

@Blue Republic
than Breitbart articles on isolated cases, especially from Hong Kong or Taiwan.

Try this link to see how Breitbart reports on China:
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffsb&q=breitbart+china&ia=web

The following weird video has been circulating for months. It came from Taiwan News. Did you expect something different? Do you really think the CCP has "bungled handling of Wuhan coronavirus outbreak"?

Video shows Chinese woman call for Taiwan independence, denounce CCP
Exasperated by Beijing's bungled handling of Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, Chinese woman calls for end to CCP rule

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Video surfaced on Sunday (Feb. 15) of a Chinese woman exasperated by Beijing's bungling of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, who came out in support of independence for Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan and also called for ordinary Chinese to stand up to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

In the opening of the video, the woman addresses her "fellow citizens," saying that ordinary people are being sacrificed by the "schemes and plans of the government." She complains the government does not care about the average person and that no amount of money can buy the necessary medicine and hospital beds needed to treat the deadly virus.

Try searching for: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=china+back+to+work&t=ffsb&df=w&ia=news

China’s coronavirus recovery is ‘a promising sign’ the US could bounce back just as quickly, says market analyst
Published Tue, Mar 31 2020
...
China, where the virus emerged about three months ago, also saw a significant drop in traffic congestion when the country went on lockdown in the wake of the virus, Colas said.

“The interesting thing is that as they’ve started to bring the economy back up to life, the weekday traffic is getting back to normal. The weekend traffic, which is consumer traffic, discretionary traffic, is still at quite low levels,” he said. “So, they’re doing a good job of bringing the economy back up, but consumer confidence just isn’t there yet.”

That should still bode well for U.S. businesses, however, given China’s rapid rate of recovery, Colas said.

“Particularly in important cities like Shenzhen and Beijing and Shanghai, they were able to come back up to quasi-normal levels of weekday activity within a month,” he said. “So, that is a promising sign if we’re thinking about what the [end] of this is for the U.S. They were able to do it. We should be able to accomplish something similar.”
...

China Roars Back To Work, Even As Rest Of World Is Shut By COVID-19 Pandemic

The Coronavirus pandemic has brought the world to a halt as almost all the countries struggle to maintain their daily operations. Amid the global shutdown, one country has revived back from the health crisis and has started living its life as it was. Co-incidentally, this is the same country from where it all started – China.

Factories that were shutdown have started reopening in the state of China. Correspondingly, workers are returning to work and assembly lines are once again rolling to manufacture products in masses. In short, the entire Industrial complex in the country is reviving.

#4 and what comes out of the official Chinese media is any more trustworthy?

I don't buy that the situation in China is anywhere as near normal and under control as they are now trying to convey. Not all Chinese people believe their situation and system is so wonderful - although the ones who are courageous enough to say so tend to get disappeared with an efficiency the Clintons could only dream of.

A Chinese student who called for Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping to step down in a message posted to social media on Monday has gone missing. On Tuesday, reports suggested he was in police custody for his remarks.

Zhang says he was once a young supporter of the ruling CCP, referring to himself as a former “little pink,” a term to describe youths indoctrinated by the regime. However, after bypassing the government’s internet censorship, he discovered the truth about the CCP and its “sinister” history. In his statement, Zhang referred to his enlightenment as scaling the “Great Firewall” of CCP internet censorship:

Since I scaled the Great Firewall, I gradually came to the realization that the Chinese Communist Party has extended its dragon claws into every corner of the world, including the collective farming [1950s], the Cultural Revolution [1966-1976], the Great Famine [1958-1961], the One-Child Policy, the Tiananmen massacre [1989], as well as the persecution of the Falun Gong [spiritual movement], and the peoples of Tibet, Hong Kong and Xinjiang.

“And yet everyone continues to turn a blind eye, singing the party’s praises. I just can’t bear it,” said Zhang. He added that the pro-democracy Hong Kong protests and the Taiwan presidential elections, which defeated a Beijing-backed candidate, had helped change his mind.

Is this propaganda, too?

Has the ring of truth to me, maybe I'm being duped (after all, the Russians had me supporting Tulsi Gabbard and I didn't even get to be plied with five star hotel suites and high grade Russian hookers).

(attributed to dissident Chinese now-disappeared billionaire, Ren Zhiquiang)

The reality shown by this epidemic is that the Party defends its own interests, the government officials defend their own interests, and the monarch only defends the status and interests of the core. Precisely this type of system is capable of a situation where only the ruler’s order is obeyed with no regard for the people. When the epidemic had already broken out, they wouldn’t dare admit it to the public without the king’s command. They wouldn’t dare announce the facts of the matter, and instead used the method of catching and criticizing “rumors” to restrict the spread of truth, resulting in the disease’s uncontainable spread.

[…] China’s ruling party concealed the cause of the outbreak, then using the power of the entire country, followed up by sealing a city, deceiving the trust of the WHO, and winning international praise. But, it was harder to again deceive the Chinese people caught in the epidemic. Those who live in a democratic country with freedom of speech perhaps don’t know the pain of the lack of a free press and free expression. But Chinese people know that this epidemic and all the unnecessary suffering it brought came directly from a system that strictly prohibits the freedom of press and speech.

"We have to stand up for the next generation"

This woman did - literally risking her life to do so.

(if anyone can get that video to play on youtube you're ahead of me - my browser goes crazy every time I try - could only manage to view it on Duck Duck Go and Breitbart. Just coincidence, of course)

@Lily O Lady
garlic included. After the poisoned baby food catastrophe (same poison as was in the Chinese pet food catastrophe that we got in the US), I was like, Fuck That, Nevermore. Whenever my Chinese colleagues return from visiting their families, they bring various "treats from home". I do not indulge.

Mind you, it seems like it's getting more and more difficult to determine the country of origin of some foods, but other than occasional latin american produce (ain't no US grown bananas!), even-more-occasional european cheese, Basmati rice from India, coconut milk from southeast asia, coffee, chocolate/cocoa, olive oil (i hope!) from Italy or Spain, and various spices from parts unknown, I will do my best to avoid any food that isn't produced in the US or Canada.

Oh, and whisky. Whisky from Scotland. That's food, right? Am I right?

And yeah, your S-I-L may be drinking Ricardo's Comparative Advantage Koolaid, but I say, "Merci, non!"

#5

I told my s-I-l that I thought that was unwise. He gave me the argument that it was the best use of resources. I love him, but he’s wrong.