Easy there OP, do you think food is some kind of “human right” or something? Before you know it, people will be saying housing is too.
In 2021, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution that everyone has a right to food and the UN should work to eliminate world hunger. It passed 186 for and 2 against. The two countries that disagreed were the United States and Isreal.
Not to defend them, but that only makes them less hypocritical than others. Talk (and UN resolutions) are cheap, and most countries don’t guarantee food or shelter in practice. Finland is the only one that comes to mind as actually achieving this.
Edit: perhaps the downvoters would like to prove me wrong by providing their own examples?
Cuba pretty much manages to eliminate hunger and homelessness, as did the USSR and the entire soviet block
There is a very logical progression of basic human needs. Without oxygen, a human will die in less than an hour. We need clean breathable air. Without water, a human a will die in less than a month. We need clean drinkable water. Without food a human will die in less than a year. Shelter is trickier because people can die of exposure and hypothermia in a matter of hours, but may be able to survive without it.
- Air for profit
- Water for profit <- This exists
- Food for profit <- We are here
- Shelter for profit
There is an issue with that approach.
When they say free speech is a right, life is a right, freedom of conscience is a right and so on, they mean that others can’t take away from you what’s already yours. Our world, eh, is still that bad that this requires clarification and most people disagree with some or all of these.
I’d say in the situation where there are no white spots on the map, and growing food requires land and other such resources, and those have already been shared, - yes, these are rights. But a different kind by different logic.
A bit like the first part is reactive, while the second part is active. I’m bad with words.
During the Great Depression the federal government literally paid farmers to not harvest crops because allowing that much food to be produced would dilute the market and bring down crop prices.
During the Great Depression.
A time when people were starving and there were virtually no forms of welfare.
When millions were thrust into poverty for reasons entirely out of their control.
The federal government paid farmers to create less food to protect profit margins.
Farmers have bills to pay, too. If the price of growing food doesn’t cover the cost to make it they’ll go out of business. Then there will be one less farm to grow food. If there’s no farms and we’re totally reliant on imports, that’s a strategic weakness.
It’s the same reason we prop up carmakers when they go out of business: Manufacturing capacity is a strategic asset just like farmland.
Then subsidize the farmers by the amount you were paying them to not harvest the food ? They don’t make any money when they aren’t selling it at all either, without this intervention…
Are you sure you aren’t thinking of crop rotation? Have 4 fields, have one fallow every 4 years to recharge the soil. Keep farming without doing so causes the topsoil to blow and that caused the great dustbowl which preceded the great depression.
My grandpa was offered to be paid to let the harvested corn just rot, so it was after harvest.
It boggles my mind how little people are aware of this kind of practice. The Who even wrote a “joke” song about it in the 70s:
Well, I farmed for a year and grew a crop of corn
That stretched as far as the eye can see
That’s a whole lot of cornflakes
Near enough to feed New York till 1973
Cultivation is my station and the nation
Buys my corn from me immediately
And holding sixty thousand bucks, I watch as dumper trucks
Tip New York’s corn flakes in the sea
~~
Well, my pick and spade are rusty
Because I’m paid on trust
To leave my square of cornfield bare
Probably to keep from ripping up the top soil during the harvest. Kind of counterintuitive to use less farmland and to produce less when the price is high, but same thing works with oil fields - you get more the slower you pump.
The reasons behind it are quite simple:
- Food spoils very quickly, so mostly if you don’t consume it locally you need to quickly export which is quite expensive. Very often it’s simply cheaper to utilize it for example as fertilizer.
- Storing food is costly.
- The best option would be not to produce an excess of food but 1) demand is hard to predict 2) crops output is hard to predict 3) for legal reasons like contractual obligations it’s better to produce more than less.
- Current markets are hardly free: see https://www.history.com/news/government-cheese-dairy-farmers-reagan
In today’s world every person who starves, who does without, who suffers unnecessarily…
Does so only because someone wants it so . Not because there is not enough
It was rather radicalizing finding out that the world makes three times as many calories per person than is necessary to feed every person on this planet, but because we’re idiots living in a class society in the year 12024 HE, luxury restaurants regularly dump slightly subprime ingredients in the trash while thousands starve.
This specifically talks about food.
According to health.com, the average person needs between 1600 to 3000 kilocalories a day depending on sex and age.
According to Our World In Data, even Africa, the continent with the least food reserves, has enough to give everyone roughly 2500 kcal, which ought to be more or less enough given how people with higher and lower caloric needs balance out. Seeing as how developed countries have more than enough, if a portion of that went to Africa and Asia, everyone could eat.
Calories are a rough measure, and according to Bahadur et al. we are overproducing grains but underproducing fruits, but the wretched of the Earth and the prisoners of starvation are not even getting that grain.
Edit: I have been informed that “calories” in nutrition are in fact “large-C calories”, A.K.A. kilocalories. On the other hand, the OWiD numbers, which document the number of kcal available per day, still suggest that we have enough to feed everyone. I have altered the comment accordingly.
Only half of the world’s croplands are used to grow crops that are consumed by humans directly. We use a lot of land to grow crops for biofuels and other industrial products, and an even bigger share is used to feed livestock.
This is a beef and corn problem fueled by subsidies.
