Ending hunger by 2030 would cost just $93 billion a year — less than one per cent of the $21.9 trillion spent on military budgets over the past decade, according to the UN World Food Programme (WFP).
Slightly philosophical question, but what does “ending world hunger” mean? Spending 1% of military budget to feed everyone once? Hiring lifelong farmers to build out fields and grow food? Would not food security lead to higher birth rates, which would eventually lead to higher food requirements, when sometimes it already feels somewhat unsustainable? I’m just confused at the meaning behind “ending world hunger”
what does “ending world hunger” mean?
Distributing agricultural surplus at market rate relative to population demand rather than market demand.
Would not food security lead to higher birth rates
Firstly, no.
The higher the degree of education and GDP per capita of a human population, subpopulation or social stratum, the fewer children are born in any developed country.[
Pulling people out of starvation tends to reduce family sizes, as people don’t plan their families with the expectation of high levels of child mortality.
Secondly, “you need to starve to death because we’re afraid you might live long enough to have kids” is a fucked public policy on the scale of Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Finally,
lead to higher food requirements, when sometimes it already feels somewhat unsustainable?
Sustainability is a consequence of land use policy, not population rate. India and China are the classic case studies of this in practice. But you can see the pattern repeated across the planet.
Vegetarian agriculture is significantly less taxing on the ecology than animal agriculture. When you compare arable land requirements per Ethiopia, Bangledish, or Thailand residents to the dietary demands of Americans, Israelis, or Argentinians, what you discover is the enormous toll animal farming takes.
The unsustainable clear cutting of jungle and near-malicious misuse of limited irrigation drives up costs and cripples availability in even the wealthiest (and most thinly populated) nations on Earth.
Meanwhile, significantly more populace regions can thrive on a primarily vegetarian diet.
That’s a good question, followed by a lot of bad assumptions.
Excuse me for being skeptical, but I’ve been hearing about ending world hunger for 3 decades now, and if it’s as easy as moving only 1% of the military budget, then… I just feel like there’s more to this than media tells us on the surface level
No shit. Famine has been a policy decision for decades at this point. We’re past the point of scarcity where anyone would ever need to starve, so starvation in today’s world is a direct result of other people’s decision to have them starve. It’s evil.
But that’s alright. Those very same people are ensuring that times of scarcity are returning.
I think people underestinate the logistic hurdle behind making the food available for everyone.
We produce enough calories for sure, but delivering the extra meatball from my plate on the arctic circle to the plate of starving kid in the South Sudan is not that simple.
For effectivelly to end famine in everywhere need to make a massive push to train locals to farm effectivetely and get working infrasturcture for them to farm, process and deliver the produce where it needs to go. It would need full cooperation from the leaders in those countries to be effective and in unstable countries in africa and middle-east its not given.
Also many places where the famine is a problem there are also other hurdless like not having enouhg arable land or landscape that makes it impossible to make farm land. Those places need to rely on food deliveries where fossil fuel use and product shelf live would be one new hurdle.
This all while, not easy, is doable, but it would need long term planning and unwavering support from larger countries and in the current situation where USA is in a tug of war, where after every election new leader spends 4 years in undoing the last leaders decitions, India has its own problems, China is doing their their own thing and Russia is doing their best to make world as unstable as they can, while EU has their own problems, i dont see how we could do it.
If solving hunger world wide would be so easy as some people think it is, it would be done allready.
Yeah, but fuck the poor. What have they ever done for society, other than all of the essential work that civilization collapses without?
We should be making more world-ending bombs instead.
*Less than 10%
You can’t say it costs X per year but then use a decade for the other number.
God doesn’ t want us to feed people, he wants armageddon.
I don’t remember Zeus saying anything like that.
Sieg Heil!
Oh, wait. No, that was the other guy. I get them mixed up a lot, cause they are both such twats.
That explains a lot with the revelations book.
The challenge here is that it takes more than money to solve world hunger.
You also need some way to prevent the greedy from hoarding food and using it as a weapon to subjugate others, keeping them hungry.
As usual, the problem isn’t lack of food or lack of money, it’s greedy people not wanting to share.
Remembering when the Live Aid food was left to rot.
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1985/07/13/Food-rotting-in-Ethiopia-report-says/7042490075200/
Or, like, US aid just this year
This has been the problem since time immemorial. If you have a solution, you are a better person than I.
Maybe the solution is more peacekeeping forces to ensure the food output from the local farmers isn’t stolen, destroyed or hoarded.
What if we sent so much food that the hoarders couldn’t hoard it all? Just a metric assload of food. Eventually food is so cheap and plentiful the hoarders give up.
You flood their market with cheap food and you put all their domestic farmers out of business.
Dumping charity on developing countries rarely works. You need to help them invest in their economy. This was shown with that micro loans paper (which won a Nobel prize).
Yup. Goods aid is only a very short-term measure. Vaccines for example expire if not stored correctly and used promptly.
Service aid is more effective medium-term, such as when the BBC World Service ran their health advisory bulletins during the W African Ebola outbreak.
Investment aid is the long-term solution, with the goal of a sustainable uplift in living standards, such as aid money being spent on the Indian space programme which allows satellites to monitor landslides and direct assistance safely.
Food should never have been a buisness in the first place.
Also areas that are struggling with food shortage and famine don’t really have for profit farmers. You’ll find that the majority are subsistence farming and maybe sell a little bit of excess. The exception would be those in these places that own a ton of land and have the money to farm at scale. Remaining food needs typically come from wealthier nations producing excess food at scale.
Ideally the state should produce staple crops at scale. Keep the people fed. This frees up subsistence farmers to engage in other economic sectors or employs them through the state to produce food. Either way it’s more reliable and more people get to eat. For the for profit farmers they could simply focus crops that aren’t staples.
The hoarders have guns. They will take it all, and they will be able to recruit more with the promise of that food.
If he wanted to, Elon Musk could personally fund this five times over and still have a few billion left.
Didn’t he brag a while ago he’d do it if someone came up with a plan and then WHO (or UN or whoever) did and Elmo suprisingly didn’t do anything?
YUP.
Did you miss the words “a year”?
Did you miss “by 2030”?
Moving military funds into food aid would be extra effective considering that world hunger is largely created by military spending.
Yes, but do non-hungry people help rich people kill and rob others as well as weapons?
They never ask the right questions!
Why is an annual figure being directly compared to an “over the past decade” figure?
You missed the “by 2030” part, indicating that what’s being compared to the decade of military spending is the overall, not yearly, cost.
Feeding people directly creates a dependant population, you need to solve the problems of food supply locally
In some cases sure, but there are places that require emergency food supplies because their local sources have been destroyed (usually by war or colonization/genocide), so you need to be able to feed people in the interim while they rebuild their means of food production.
While I do agree it’s more complicated than “money = food,” a lot of this complexity is fueled by imperialism of one kind or another, so this isn’t an “oh well that’s just life” situation. People would be less hungry if, for example, the people keeping them hungry weren’t financed and armed by America and (occasionally) China. The message of “we could fix this if we wanted” is still accurate.
I think they meant that it cost way more than food to solve world hunger.
to solve world hunger you need:
- Put an end to all Civil wars
- Stop countries from using hunger as weapon (i.e Israel)
- eliminate all dictators who hoard their countries’ wealth to themselves and their generals
- stop powerful countries from destabilizing poorer ones to their benefit.
- provide proper medical care and education otherwise people would just reproduce more until they absorb the additional food supply
Giving money to poorer countries helps but it will not “solve” the hunger problem no matter how much you give.
This is an important point. Simply giving a ton of rice to an area will put the rice farmers in that area out of business.
They’ll need to grow something else to make a living, but then when the next year comes around, no one is making rice anymore and they’ll be dependent on that external flow of rice.
