How many weeks of food supply does the first world have as backup?

[repoman]

And has it decreased in recent years?

Let me be a heartless bastard and neglect the places that are already either having some degree of famine or just barely keeping afloat through food aid.

I am talking about Europe, North America and China and so on. They seem to be doing well, but will one bad year really hammer them?

Of course, waste and low productivity involved in meat and dairy is important. a transition to lower levels of this could restore some of the slack in the system.

 

[bilby]

And has it decreased in recent years?

Let me be a heartless bastard and neglect the places that are already either having some degree of famine or just barely keeping afloat through food aid.

I am talking about Europe, North America and China and so on. They seem to be doing well, but will one bad year really hammer them?

Of course, waste and low productivity involved in meat and dairy is important. a transition to lower levels of this could restore some of the slack in the system.

You needn't be too heartless; there are very few places with famine or near famine today, compared to thirty or forty years ago. With a tiny number of exceptions, famine has pretty much ceased to exist outside war zones.

The answer to your question varies considerably, but for staple grains, such as wheat, about one month would be the minimum stockpile before people started to worry; if stocks get much over a year, they tend to be 'dumped' on third world markets, as this is cheaper than storing them.

EU stockpiles used to be huge, but some effort has been made to reduce them in recent years; the Common Agricultural Policy was infamous for first creating mountains of surplus, and then paying farmers NOT to produce crops that would only add to those stockpiles.

Too much food is a bigger problem for the developed world than too little. Stockpiles have reduced in recent years, but only through concerted effort to do so.

 

[dystopian]

A couple of years back (2012), there were some calls to increase our grain reserves here in the Netherlands due to the possibility of American draughts causing price increases. An archived newssegment from then that I just watched claimed that at the time Germany had a grain reserve of a year, and the Netherlands a reserve of no more than 10 weeks. Some more recent information that I found suggests that the total EU grain reserve is for a little over 9 weeks. The response to the proposal to increase our reserves back in 2012 from others, including the then minister of agriculture was essentially: it's more expensive, unneccesary, plus keeping large reserves could actually disrupt prices even more.

Even if we had a really bad year, there'd probably still be more than enough food produced to keep the developed world fed. Short of some unrealistic scenario like total war or a zombie apocalypse, I don't see a real problem for the west.

 

[Peez]

I keep a snack bar in my desk.

Peez