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[Doomblade187]

In every case, the issue is resources only go to people when it's profitable.

That's a bit absolutist isn't it?  Overstocked resources are quite often sold even "below cost" just to clear shelves.

I suspect the farmers plowing their fields under is more to do with perverse insurance policies that don't give a payout if you donate crops than it is to do with lack of profit.

I mean I'd rather sell my food at very low prices, or give it away, than spend the effort and resources to plow it into the ground.  Unless plowing a crop into the ground can help the soil in some way maybe, so that does have some benefit? I dunno.

Hmm, it's almost like the federal government could help with this problem.

[bloop_bleep]

Because it's literally just pieces of paper. Using it doesn't mean making more resources, it means changing allocation of existing resources. It's a systematic issue.

Yes. Spending money is changing the allocation of resources to oneself. Currently a significant fraction of the population doesn't have enough "little pieces of paper" to allocate a decent amount of resources to themselves. If we insist on staying with the little pieces of paper model, does it not make sense to give these people more little pieces of paper so they have the ability to allocate more resources to themselves? As SalmonGod said, nowhere is it a problem with production of food, or shelter. There's enough for everyone with some to spare. I don't understand where you're trying to pin your point here.

[Frumple]

Milk producers are pouring their products into ditches because "there isn't enough demand", and yet, anecdotally at my grocery store, milk stocks are showing signs of depletion. (Pre-covid you never saw the whole milk section even dented compared to skim and 2%. Now, Whole Milk is like 95% gone while the other milk products, while being low, still have more stock.)

I would not be surprised if many producers, while legitimately taking a hit, are overstating it so they can reap more subsidies and protections. Fucking dairy industry has been doing this for decades already.

Wouldn't surprise me, either, but it's also possibly legit. Think about how much milk demand came from schools alone, or various coffee shops or eateries or whatever, most of which are now closed or operating at significantly reduced capacity (what with people not wanting to catch or spread the crow plague). Some of that would shift to at-home, but not all of it, and supply lines going to grocery stores both might not be able to keep up with what demand has shifted, and not able to rapidly shift to accommodate what spare supply is being freed up elsewhere.

So you'd have less demand in general, and significant amounts of supply previously intended to go to, say, those shitty one-serving milk cartons in cafeterias, not able to immediately transition into larger gallon/half-gallon/whatever that stock stores, that are now at higher demand. Enough demand loss overall suppliers can't sell all their stuff, on top of struggling supply in specific areas. Supposedly a lot of what's been going on with toilet paper is due to similar issues.

This surprised me, how is wasting product helpful? Why would they dump milk into ditches? This is wasteful and helps no one

Storage is a thing, especially with product that can go bad fairly rapidly. If you got no where to put it and no reasonable way to slow down production, it goes to waste. It's not helpful, but at least portions of it also probably isn't avoidable, at least as conditions currently stand.

It might be avoidable if there were, say, a significant effort by government actors to step in and coordinate/manage the logistics and whatnot involved, but, well, this is the ameripol thread, it's an issue with country-wide scope, and our current federal government is literally worse than useless in a number of ways

[Reelya]

Milk producers are pouring their products into ditches because "there isn't enough demand", and yet, anecdotally at my grocery store, milk stocks are showing signs of depletion. (Pre-covid you never saw the whole milk section even dented compared to skim and 2%. Now, Whole Milk is like 95% gone while the other milk products, while being low, still have more stock.)

I would not be surprised if many producers, while legitimately taking a hit, are overstating it so they can reap more subsidies and protections. Fucking dairy industry has been doing this for decades already.

This surprised me, how is wasting product helpful? Why would they dump milk into ditches? This is wasteful and helps no one

Say you are a milk producer and it costs you 10 cents to ship a liter milk and the company is offering you 9 cents a liter for it. You can't afford to make it then. That's why products get dumped.

And the "cost" is actually a proxy for "resources". For example if fuel is in high demand but milk is in low demand, should you waste fuel shipping milk around? In that case, you're wasting resources on transporting, refrigerating, freezing etc, the product so you don't "waste resources". Hint: it costs a lot of other resources to transport and process stuff.

EDIT: As an analogy think of it on a person level. Jars are useful, you don't want to waste jars. So, should you never throw any jars away. Eventually you'll have so many jars you need a bigger house or a storage shed just for the jars. Is this an efficient use of your time and space resources?

It's the same with things like society-level production. Sometimes we as a society make a lot more of something than we need.

It's actually wrong-thinking to think that every last drop of that milk *must* be consumed by a human or we've been "wasteful". In fact, it cost so much in resources to handle the milk that it would be more wasteful to push un-needed milk into the processing system in the first place, "because we don't want to be wasteful". That's the sunk-cost fallacy: spending more in resources on unwanted things to avoid "wasting" the original resources.

The price-crash for the farmers is a price signal that signals that the milk isn't needed. The reason for the surplus is that dairy farmers can't scale production from cows up or down very quickly. They'll then scale down milk production if the demand stays low. But think about it this way: if they make less milk they're "wasting milk-production capacity" so not making in the first place is effectively same as pouring gallons of unwanted milk into ditches.

[SalmonGod]

The explanation I've consistently heard is because it's supply that was meant for restaurants and the like, as Frumple mentioned, and that in the process of re-arranging logistics to get that product out to people directly, those businesses would lose money.  It is cheaper to deliberately waste it than it is to get resources to people who need it.  And we're not talking just milk.  All kinds of produce.  Fruits, vegetables, eggs, etc.

But the problem isn't just supply chain disruption.  It's also tens of millions of people becoming unemployed.  Even if all of that wasted food were immediately re-routed to grocery stores without a hiccup, many of those unemployed would still be unable to buy it anyway, and it would go to waste all the same.  Which is what has always happened all the time, it's just happening on a larger scale right now.

And even one step further - the capitalist structure creates this situation where simply giving stuff away is something special that has to be bureaucratized through charity organizations in order to co-exist and reconcile with the imaginary number game.  So food banks are limited by personnel and funding in their ability to absorb and distribute that food, which is something that's also actually happening right now.

But if simply producing stuff and making it available to a community unconditionally without the intervention of an imaginary number game were the norm, there would be absolutely no problems right now.  Simple fact is, with the exception of inner city poor, everyone else who is starving right now is doing so within trivial distance of food that is being deliberately wasted.  It wouldn't take an immense effort to solve that problem.  And the only reason it's not is because of the influence of the ultra-rich.  Because the exchange of goods has to be reconciled with a system that operates to their benefit.  They own the companies that own the people who are producing that food, they own the legal system that governs how charity is allowed to happen, etc.  It all has to operate for their profit or it doesn't operate at all.  And when a pandemic forces economic activity to stop, that means it doesn't operate at all.

This is the reason for the massive push to re-open business despite the pandemic still raging, btw.  Because the upper class faces a choice.  Either face popular rage because millions go starving and homeless at the same time as there is obviously food and shelter to go around, on a much larger scale than the existing propaganda machine can mitigate.  Or distribute resources, and by extension their own wealth, freely to prevent an angry breakdown of society during the pandemic, show the people that all the decades of claims that this was impossible was a lie all along, and expect that they'll never want to go back.  Or press all their leverage into forcing a return to normalcy, with the only difference being that the gears of the economy require greasing with more blood than usual to keep turning.  You can see which choice they're going with.

[SalmonGod]

For example if fuel is in high demand but milk is in low demand, should you waste fuel shipping milk around?

It's actually wrong-thinking to think that every last drop of that milk *must* be consumed by a human or we've been "wasteful".

You're quite frankly being hilarious right now.

[Reelya]

For example if fuel is in high demand but milk is in low demand, should you waste fuel shipping milk around?

It's actually wrong-thinking to think that every last drop of that milk *must* be consumed by a human or we've been "wasteful".

You're quite frankly being hilarious right now.

My point is that not every drop of every resource *needs* to be consumed by a human. Especially in the USA. Have you looked at your waistlines? You're not exactly stretched for calories, mate.

This is an economic but also an ecological point. While you're at it you could convert literally every square inch to milk production. If not using the current milk surplus is wasteful, it's by definition also wasteful to not produce the absolute maximum amount of milk humanly possible.

Also, yes, shipping that milk around, especially if it needs to be refrigerated is a huge carbon emitter. If the milk isn't needed it's actually *ecologically* better that you just don't ship it in the first place.

So you're going to burn coal and oil to ship and refrigerate milk that's not actually economically viable, so as not to be "wasteful". Real smart move.

[SalmonGod]

For example if fuel is in high demand but milk is in low demand, should you waste fuel shipping milk around?

It's actually wrong-thinking to think that every last drop of that milk *must* be consumed by a human or we've been "wasteful".

You're quite frankly being hilarious right now.

My point is that not every drop of every resource *needs* to be consumed by a human. This is an economic but also an ecological point.

Especially in the USA. Have you looked at your waistlines? You're not exactly stretched for calories, mate.

That's such a ridiculous interpretation of the point that it's near-impossible to believe it's good faith.  Nobody is arguing that all resources must be consumed.  It's a problem when resources are wasted while there are people in need.  It's an immense problem when huge amounts of resources are wasted while huge numbers of people are in need.  If food were wasted, but everyone was fed, I wouldn't have a thing to say about it.  Unless it was an astronomical environment-threatening amount of waste.  But that would be a separate issue.

For example if fuel is in high demand but milk is in low demand, should you waste fuel shipping milk around?

This stood out to me as hilarious because this conversation is specifically within the context of the pandemic, when fuel is in the lowest demand it's been in decades, and cost is the lowest I've seen in at least 20 years.

[bloop_bleep]

Especially in the USA. Have you looked at your waistlines? You're not exactly stretched for calories, mate.

Hold on, what?

You did hear the part where 1 out of 5 children are hungry in the USA?

[Reelya]

That's really an issue with how Trump slashed the food stamp program. And not having a generally good safety net in the USA in general.

But the general point i was making still stands. Sometimes it can be more wasteful of resources to try and "save resources" if it costs fuel and energy to manage something that's actually in excess to what's in demand. It's related to the sunk-cost fallacy as I've said: "that milk exists, so surely we should store it and do stuff with it", but in saying so we're ignoring that storing and doing stuff with it is a commitment to invest additional other resources into handling the milk, and those same resources can't then be used for other things.

The situation with excess milk having to be thrown away and there being hungry people are entirely orthogonal. The same thing happens in the EU despite there being very strong social safety nets. Fixing the social safety net absolutely doesn't mean that things like that won't happen.

[Naturegirl1999]

I don’t mean we should produce for people who don’t need it, I’m trying to say that people do need it, and giving it to people in need is going to help them more than throwing things in ditches and landfills will.

Is it illegal for companies to give away surplus resources to people who couldn’t afford them?

If not, why do they throw away things instead? This isn’t just about milk. This applies to other things too. If I have lots of alfalfa plants, and burn my production instead of giving it to people for free, it would be wasteful. If I give everyone my alfalfa, dividing it so everyone including me gets the same amount, that would be far less wasteful than burning all of it

[Reelya]

but it costs money to distribute. Which is a way of saying we need to burn fossil fuels to distribute it. The milk doesn't walk by itself. That's my point. Distributing it is an investment of additional resources, and you need to justify using those resources, and who's going to pay for it.

Also remember this is wholesale milk in huge barrels probably. It's not bottled, so you have to pay for bottling, you have to use plastic packaging etc. Other poster said it was milk intended for the restaurant industry.

[bloop_bleep]

I don’t mean we should produce for people who don’t need it, I’m trying to say that people do need it, and giving it to people in need is going to help them more than throwing things in ditches and landfills will.

Is it illegal for companies to give away surplus resources to people who couldn’t afford them?

If not, why do they throw away things instead? This isn’t just about milk. This applies to other things too. If I have lots of alfalfa plants, and burn my production instead of giving it to people for free, it would be wasteful. If I give everyone my alfalfa, dividing it so everyone including me gets the same amount, that would be far less wasteful than burning all of it

Food corps don't care about wastefulness, they care about profits. It costs money to store and distribute milk without getting paid for it. Additionally, if you're giving excess stock away for free, then some of the people who were buying your food before would stop buying it because they can get it for free. It's why grocery stores throw away excess produce and lock the dumpsters so that not even desperate homeless people who would eat out of a dumpster can get the food without paying.

EDIT: Reelya, you can't possibly justify saying "there's just not enough demand!!" when a fifth of the population is starving, food stamps or not. Believe it or not, there are many people who would very much like to buy some food. The reason they don't produce so much "demand" in the economic sense is because they don't have enough money for food. So they don't buy as much. That's the main problem.

[SalmonGod]

That's really an issue with how Trump slashed the food stamp program. And not having a generally good safety net in the USA in general.

But the general point i was making still stands. Sometimes it can be more wasteful of resources to try and "save resources" if it costs fuel and energy to manage something that's actually in excess to what's in demand. It's related to the sunk-cost fallacy as I've said: "that milk exists, so surely we should store it and do stuff with it", but in saying so we're ignoring that storing and doing stuff with it is a commitment to invest additional other resources into handling the milk, and those same resources can't then be used for other things.

The situation with excess milk having to be thrown away and there being hungry people are entirely orthogonal. The same thing happens in the EU despite there being very strong social safety nets. Fixing the social safety net absolutely doesn't mean that things like that won't happen.

The problem is the USA doesn't have a good safety net.

But let me re-iterate my point that no one was contesting and doesn't relate very much.

Also, other places have good safety nets and still have the same problems.

You're twisting yourself in knots trying to Well Actually so hard into capitalism making sense.

[Reelya]

Well there are two alternatives there.

First, you could fix the demand issue. Through extending the social safety net in various ways. The problem here is that this categorically doesn't fix the waste problem. By ramping up demand to cover the vulnerable, total waste might get worse.

Second, you could fix the supply issue. I guess you could have the government run the entire supply chain there or something. But, bureaucracy running the supply chain doesn't have a super-great track record for not being wasteful either.

You're twisting yourself in knots trying to Well Actually so hard into capitalism making sense.

The thing about the dairy thing is that this demand-crash was inevitable, capitalism or not. People just aren't going out to eat anymore. Capitalism didn't cause that. There are huge disruptions in people's consumption patterns, everywhere, at the moment.

Sure, you can make a system in which waste doesn't happen. But it's not capitalism that causes the issue, it's having choice. A system with zero waste would also be a system where you basically don't get to choose what you eat, there's centrally planned production. The problem is that such a system is just as rigid with production amounts if not more so that those farmers with their milk production. In the centrally planned system you keep the farmer farming milk no matter if needs change and ensure they're not exposed to price-signals that signal change in demand. It ends up meaning huge refrigerated warehouses full of milk, not people getting the milk.