How the heck does Cantha survive?

I was just looking at the map while working on my Canthan guardian title and I noticed there is like..no green at all. So my question is, how the heck do they feed everybody, there are no farms!

The Luxons I guess could eat turtles and scuttlefish and such, I suppose the Kurzicks might live off mushrooms and fungal wallows, but how do you feed everybody who lives in Kaineng? It's like..a city the size of half a continent, theres no way you could import enough food for everybody and there's nowhere in Cantha to grow it, It doesn't really make sense.

Notice the map doesn't reveal much south of the Jade Sea or the Echovald.

Individual villages outside of Kaineng seem to support themselves (rice fields on Shing Jea). Xenomortis has a good point - we don't see every part of Cantha. There's also a pretty good-sized island just south of the Monastery that I could see having a potentially large fruit or grains crop, and we have no idea what is up in the mountainous areas.

Plus there's always trade. I'm sure material exports would net them lots and lots of bushels of grains.

Also, from my impressions of Kaineng I would say that they kind of fail at feeding everyone. It seemed like that entire city was one big overcrowded slum. XD

Pretty much the way I see it, especially the slum. Major reason I absolutely despise Kaineng.

Actually, in the BMP Tengu Accords, it's revealed the mountains in the south are, well, mountains. Snow-capped and cold, not suitable for farming.

Of course you may mean the mountains north of the Jade Sea. Those could well have a far better farming climate than the southern ones.

Way i see it - prophs is farming and some mining which is exported , cantha imports food and some materials and exports its own materials.Also i suppose canthans eat a lot of kappa`s which are probably captured with cucumbers from prophs ( check out kappas and cucumbers on wiki and u`ll know what i mean )

Well there's one thing you're all missing here: there's an entire ocean full of fish right off the coast.
They also apparently eat lots of pickled vermin tongues.

http://guildwars.wikia.com/wiki/The_Marketplace

According to the "An Empire Divided" work that came with the Factions Prima guide and is canon lore - the farms on Shing Jea provide enough food for the entire Empire of the Dragon (those on Shing Jea and in Kaineng City). Those in the Jade Sea probably feast off of fish and the wallows (the truffles are very much edible), while those from the Echovald Forest probably eat wallows

We also know from the same document that Cantha also imports large amounts of food.

That's impressive - Shing Jea has nowhere near enough arable land to feed that city.
I'll simply assume magic.

You must remember that the size of what we see is not to scale with the size in lore. That is, what might seem like a small farm in the game may be a 100 square acre field in lore. Mind you, everything else in the continent is most likely going to have that same scale.

But do keep in mind that I said that Cantha imports a large amount of food, they have fishers, and as Zacchius said: They eat the vermins' tongues. I'm sure they eat other things as well. Like wallow Tuffles.

"Shing Jea provides enough"...yes, no, maybe...but for sure there's a lot of people starving in Kaineng, so either there's not really food enough or poor people aren't taken into statistics.

kaineng could live off of fishing in the ocean. as for outlying areas, there is a lot of land that is uncovered by us. Shing Jea Island can farm for itself and fish too.

i always say kaineing to be a place of preety much shanty towns and starvation. Now, it might have been better before the plague mind you, but its still alot of slums.
alos, i agree i would think most of their food would be fish and maybe some crops imporated from proph/shing jea and maybe some more exotic delicacies from the jade sea/encholvald forest.

Notice where they perform the annual Harvest Ceremony. The location must be tradition.

Overpopulation and disease is what factions is all about...or did you miss that point? It is like china currently if they had no imports/exports.

That makes factions' story suddenly sound deep. I wish they could have expanded upon those literary ideas ^

They actually rather did... should one actually read the dialogue of the quests (both primary and secondary) they're constantly referring to the slums, waste, and poor conditions of Kaineng City that are caused by the incompetent ministry (they never do really bring up over-population, but one could see that it is over populated by the structures being house built upon house and in some areas even collapsing).

Makes one wonder why the people just don't emigrate from the city. To Shing Jea or to the northern continents, instead of just waiting to die in hunger. I mean, they don't have much to lose, do they?

Poverty would prevent that, I would think.