how falling birth rates will get fixed in the end?

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Holland produces epic amounts of fruit & veg like peppers and tomato's it is true and the Dutch greenhouses are truly awesome in scale, when you drive to port to travel to England it is surreal. (I used to live in Holland)

But the majority of calories in the Dutch diet come from refined wheat and sugar just like the rest of the west, remove that and no amount of eating tulip bulbs will prevent starvation.

We're very much able to produce large amounts of potatoes even in open fields. In fact, in the north, we're already doing so on very large scales. I once took a sightseeing trip, and there was nothing but potatoes for miles. There is also local production of fruits and vegetables for farmer's markets in rural areas. We'd easily be able to do without refined wheat and sugar - even though we have the theoretical capacity and means to grow more than enough of that.

In fact, apparently we were, relatively speaking, the most productive wheat producers in the world in 2010, with 8.9 tonnes of wheat per hectare on average, followed by nearby Belgium. None of us would starve - we have little land, but a lot of techniques and a lot of know-how. We'd be able - and are currently able - to stamp ridiculous amounts of food out of very little land without damaging the land too much. That's very necessary in order to keep a country with some of the highest ground prices in the world profitable as an agricultural exporter.

You guys should be rightly proud of your agricultural success, it is marvellous but it still doesn't change the fact that in 2006 you had to import 31 billion euro's worth of food to eat.

You import very cheap stuff like grains, rice and pulses etc and export very expensive stuff like chilli's, peppers and tomato's. The value of your exports far exceed the value of your imports in monetary terms but in calorific terms it is a different story.

Reality is that the Netherlands hasn't been able to feed itself since Burgundian times in the 15 century, hence why you are such good traders.

There's an easy solution for that. A solution that makes this country different from most of Africa. If we stop exporting what we have now, focus on what we need to sustain our population and just start eating the results ourselves, we'll get by fine. If any country in Africa decided to do that, millions of people would starve within months.

No, no, no, you really are just ignoring everything I've said.

The stuff you grow, the expensive stuff like tomatoes and peppers has a really crap yield per acre in calorific terms, even if you rip those up and switch to high calorie yielding potatoes & apples, you are still miles off providing the calorific needs of 17,000,000 vegetarians let alone the nutritional needs.

If you ever tried it you would do a North Korea and starve to death, do a Germany and invade Poland or end up begging for food aid.

Africa is in an entirely different situation, it could very, very easily feed itself an American high meat diet but unfortunately Africa is run by crazy people.

Holland doesn't have problems like Mugabe taking your country from being Africa's biggest grain exporter to being dependent on food aid and only exporting cholera because he didn't like white people.

Holland doesn't have the problem that Kenya does where British farmers have bought up all your best land and grow organic roses on it to sell in Britain while Kenyans starve.

Dutch farmers don't have the problem of being raped and murdered by war lords and their fields burned.

Etc etc

Seriously go away and do some research about agriculture, the Netherlands hasn't been able to feed it's population for 500 years and it certainly can't today, even if you all become vegetarian. If you think it can then come back with figures to prove it using average yields not theoretical lab based ones of calories per acre and explain where you are going to get your protein from. Don't say fishing, European fisheries are way past the point of no return, we ate them all. Don't forget you also need nutritious food not just calories or you all get nasty illnesses.

Bring me back some maths, I dare you.



PS I'm not saying this from some point of superiority, Britain also can't feed itself and hasn't been able to for centuries.

No. I'm just saying we have the capacity to have several times our population in pigs and cows, and hundreds of times the amount in chickens, on just a few farms. They eat almost anything, and they produce massive amounts of meat. Additionally, because we're extremely good with water, we will always have clean drinking water in abundance. Our milk production, of course, is so large that, for several years in a row, they just had to dispose of the milk by the millions of gallons. Our production is immense, and certainly doesn't just consist of expensive and poorly-nutritional food. That bacteria scare in Germany last year hurt our economy, because we had to throw away millions of cucumbers a day. Russia wouldn't import them anymore, so part of our exports were hampered.

What I'm saying is that we'd be able to get along perfectly well with the amount of food we're producing even now. And there are actual plans by the government that show they have backup plans for when anything goes wrong in our food supply. We have tomatoes and peppers, but we're also the most efficient in the world at growing wheat, and we produce more meat than the markets of northern Europe can handle. One of the reasons the European Union introduced agricultural subsidies for farmers elsewhere was probably because they simply couldn't handle competition from us.

55% of our land is used for agriculture. Wheat is one of the most prominent products grown and used here, according to the ministry of everything that has anything to do with our economy, and the total value of our agricultural exports is approximately €72.8 billion, or almost 10% of our GDP. We'd be able to get along fine. The last time we had a famine, incidentally, was when the Germans ordered their troops to take all food we had and stop all other shipments. We've actually been in a situation where we had just our own immediate harvests to rely on - in winter, no less - and that was before we became much more productive. And even then, comparatively few people died, because there were still plenty of farms.



Actually, we would very well be able, being one of the largest producers in the world even in absolute terms, to sustain ourselves. Actually, meat would be one of the most important parts of our diet in that case - we have, again, several times our population just in pigs and cows, and we're able to breed them very quickly in giant factory farms. Not the most humane option, but just the meat from the animals alive today could sustain us for months and months.



I wasn't going to say "fishing". Actually, I was going to say "dozens of millions upon dozens of millions of pigs and cows we keep around, as well as hundreds of millions of chickens and other animals."



Alright. Here's a little table showing our annual food production.
http://www3.lei.wur.nl/ltc/Classificatie.aspx

We produce 1,175,300 metric tonnes of wheat, 204,700 metric tonnes of barley, 4,998,400 metric tonnes of potatoes, 5,858,000 metric tonnes of sugar beets, 1,582,000 metric tonnes of onions, 3,695,500 metric tonnes of maize, and an amount of vegetables that has more than doubled from 2,198,000 metric tonnes to almost 5,000,000 metrix tonnes since 1985. Our fruit production is up, too, with a noticeable increase in pears and apples. We produce 11,941,000 metric tonnes of milk each year, and that too is a rising pattern. We also produced 1,743,000 metric tonnes of meat, most of which pork, beef and sheep. We also produced 11,350,000,000 eggs.

Summarising that. Per inhabitant, per year, that is:

* 69 kg of wheat (bread takes ~0.5 kg of wheat each if it's made in an inefficient way, so that's 138 full breads per capita each year, more than most people can eat);
* 12 kg of barley;
* 294 kg of potatoes (have fun eating that);
* 344 kg of sugar beets, because nothing says starvation like the weight of some of the heaviest people in the world in sugar beets;
* 93 kg of onions, because we're an emotional people;
* 217 kg of maize;
* 294 kg of other vegetables, so 800 grammes a day excluding fruits (~200 grammes is the medically-warranted minimum they talk about here, so you have four times that);
* 702 litres of milk to wash that down. That's 1.9 litres of milk a day per capita - a lot more than I drink in milk - what about you?
* 102 kg of non-poultry non-fish meat, so 280 grammes of meat per capita per day if everyone ate meat.
* 667 eggs per capita each year.

Actual consumption per capita, even in today's society, isn't nearly that:

* 127 litres of milk (production = 702)
* 184 eggs (production = 667)
* 86.6 kg of meat (production = 102, and that's excluding poultry whereas the demand includes poultry)
* 94 kg of other vegetables (294 kg of production, need I say more?)
* 33 kg of sugar (production is much higher)
* 87 kg of potatoes (not close).

Not exactly a ration to starve on. We could literally throw more than half the total production of most things we produce on a compost heap and still live at this standard.

Impressive figures, very impressive. I'm even more impressed by the Dutch agricultural sector now than I was before, thanks for the link it's very informative.

But...

There are still a couple of glaring problems.

How are you going to feed those tens of millions animals without importing the 38 billion euro's of feedstock each year?
How are you going to fertilise the fields to sustain record breaking productivity levels?

If you try to design a proper nationwide self-reliant 'no imports' you will have to slaughter all the animals (no more imported feed) and your plant yields drop to 25% of current levels as you can't produce the fertiliser required to maintain the high yields.

(I know that at the moment you produce problematically huge amounts of manure from the huge number of animals, but remember, no imported animal feed = no animals = no manure)

PS In WWII after the Germans stole all your food and you ended up eating tulip bulbs, Holland did get saved by food aid from the USA via Britain. It is worth noting that Germany actually consented to these food deliveries. Just like Britain got saved in WWI by food aid from the US.

Don't fix what isn't broken.

Isn't Holland going to disappear as sea levels rise anyway? A smaller population would probably be better.

Nope the Dutch are in the best position to respond to sea level rise, they already have a massive network of dikes and polders protecting the country, schipol airport is 27 metres below sea level already, it doesn't matter if sea levels rise and it becomes 32 metres below sea level because the Dutch just have to slightly reinforce their defences.

A stable economy with low unemployment would certain lead to more children.

No. In world history, a stable economy and low unemployment have been consistent with fewer children.
Even today, you can see that countries building a stable economy have declining birth rates.

Hmmm. High unemployment, then! I wonder if birth rates are rising in America and Europe right now....anyone know?

Not rising with the majority of the population, but rising in some minorities. In Europe, muslims have high birth rates.
The solution to the problem of birth rates, from a historical point of view, could be to abolish all social nets, have a more socially-authoritarian state and a farming-based economy.

Is this thread a F**king joke ?

In world history, a stable economy and low unemployment have not been consistent with any clear trend in natality.

In contemporary history, however, you are sort of right, up till now at least. To be precise, the process is something like this, as I understand it:
1- stable economy, etc., but especially major advances in medical practice;
2- progressive (in the Western world) or steep (elsewhere) decrease in mortality;
3- slow changes in attitudes towards fertility, and thus decreased natality, but not necessarly matching mortality precisely (be it because natality is much higher than mortality, and thus population increases, or because fertility is lower than the replacement level, like we see in many Western countries);
4- hypothetical equilibrium, which hasn't been reached anywhere to my knowledge.