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comment by HGL
HGL  ·  2183 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How China can win a trade war in one move

We could ban food exports to china and that would cause a crisis real quick, its just as hard to bring up an agricultural industry as a mining one, maybe even harder since you need clean land expertise and time.





user-inactivated  ·  2183 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    that would cause a crisis real quick

Domestic to boot.

HGL  ·  2183 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Everyone looses, but domestic soy bean production would shift to some other crop, in the short term some big framing conglomerates would collect some government crop insurance subsidies.

kleinbl00  ·  2182 days ago  ·  link  ·  

user-inactivated  ·  2183 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It is not just soybean (pdf warning)

They're 17% of our total Agriculture Exports right now.

    in the short term some big framing conglomerates would collect some government crop insurance subsidies

... and then move to gobble up all the small operations that were just barely making it anyways. There are a lot more smallish operations than you might expect at first glance: the hubhub around contract farming is an interesting rabbit hole to google.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/16/the-decline-of-the-small-american-family-farm-in-one-chart/?utm_term=.a93c290ad58b

    mean farm size[in 2011] is 234 acres
kleinbl00  ·  2182 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It would cause a crisis, but we're not currently the only exporters of food. Food is available elsewhere, albeit for more money. It's not like China would have to burn two years ramping up food imports from somewhere else.