Exploding the myth of the feckless, lazy Greeks

[HiPointDem]

80. Thank you for the revised link. The report contains a similar table for food products only,

which gives net food imports as $1.2 billion, about .4% of greek gdp.

what you haven't shown is that that $1.2 billion in imports means greece doesn't produce enough food to feed its people.

what you also may not know is that modern trade agreements *require* countries to import food, even if they don't need to. For example, Japan is *required* to import specific amounts of rice, even though it's historically been self-sufficient in rice production.

The fact that it imports rice doesn't mean it's unable to produce its own.

But what it does mean is that international financiers are, though such trade agreements, attempting to knock down trade barriers that protected domestic agriculture from lower-cost (a/o indirectly subsidized) producers elsewhere (mostly Canada, Australia and the US).


From your link:

As expected, most of the countries in the world are net food importers, i.e. 131 out of
196. This ratio is consistent with any other product group where the exporters tend to be
more specialized than the importers.

In terms of percentages, 39 percent of industrial countries, 34 percent of middle-income
countries, and 28 percent of low-income countries are net food exporters.