Virginia is for Lovers, but Denmark is for Pigs

My eyes idly fell of late on a page of the DK World Almanac.

Denmark, apparently, is the world's leading exporter of pork.

But isn't that interesting? Little Denmark, small and highly urbanized, manages not only to feed its own dense population, but to export more excess than anyone, even much larger nations.

It follows that the rest of us have huge untapped agricultural capacity. The world, in food terms, is relatively empty of humans—we could feed lots more. Depending on crop choice, we could feed everyone alive adequately from Indiana alone. Indeed, there seems no connection at all between national wealth and the amount of arable cropland per capita: the bottom ten nations in the world in this regard include Japan, Switzerland, Kuwait, Singapore, the Netherlands, and Iceland. Nor should there be—the world long ago industrialized, and human intelligence and labour long ago replaced land as the basis of wealth. Denmark's huge hog supply probably has most to do with their dense population of skilled and able farmers.

Unluckily for Canada, along with most of the developed world: we have stopped making people.