Food isn't scarce. It's just poorly distributed.
this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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Food isn’t even poorly distributed. Almost everybody eats, and the only places people don’t eat it’s from other people with weapons actively preventing them from getting food, and actively preventing others from bringing it to them.
I’ve been homeless in America, twice. Both times I had all the food I could eat, as soon as I was willing to accept it.
The first time I relied on strangers and I ate like a king. The people of Cambridge MA just straight up gave me more food than I could eat when I asked.
The second time I stayed in a shelter in Denver. I had three square meals a day available to me, though I only ate dinner since my job didn’t permit me to attend the other meals. It was good food, donated and prepared by volunteers.
I am sick of people trying to perpetuate the myth that we have starvation in America. It’s one area we succeed in beyond the wildest dreams of anyone even 50 years ago, but haters just can’t stop hating on our society.
We feed people. We feed them extremely well.
9 million people starve to death every year
Globally, not solely in the US.
Yes, and only when people with guns are actively preventing them from getting food, and actively preventing others from bringing it to them.
First of all, that means food is poorly distributed. You are just disputing the cause.
And yes, conflict if a major cause of hunger. But what is a major cause of conflict? Fucking poverty. Al Qaeda doesn't recruit from fucking Beverly Hills. Another major cause: US intervention, for the sake of profit and geopolitical dominance, with the dominance ultimately also being for the sake of profit. The world economic system functions as a huge siphon that extracts wealth from the global south and funnels it to wealthy countries where the major institutions of finance are located. Western financial instruments like the IMF and World Bank, alongside direct political and economic pressure, enforce austerity in poor nations, dismantle social safety nets, depress wages, and privatize resources, and this very predictably results in underdevelopment and poverty, which fucking benefits the west because lower wages mean larger profit margins, lower prices and greater market share for the western companies that source their labor there. It's a fucking global sweatshop economy. And there are consequences to this, when everyone is fucking poor and uneducated and young men see no future for themselves except to become soldiers. It means conflict, which means starvation.
If the world economic system is as you claim, how is it that people in the southern hemisphere are getting steadily more wealthy?
The problem with people who criticize the free market is they’re so focused on distribution they don’t think about production. The answer is that as wealth is funneled north it is also generated at an even higher rate resulting in all humanity getting more wealthy as a result of the system that “concentrates” wealth.
Like if I had air in a bottle and concentrated it all to one corner, that would result in no air everywhere else.
But if I were to create an incredibly sense section of air while increasing the density of air throughout the bottle, it would be misleading to use the word “concentrate” for the action generating that air distribution.
As for big rich countries causing conflict I agree 100%. In fact as far as I know al qaida isn’t causing nearly as much hunger as the House of Saud, which is the richest organization in human history.
And I’m not talking about “there’s war and that makes the market break down” as the men with guns thing. I’m talking about “armies are actively blockading food”.
So “poorly distributed” is really better described as “actively withheld”. It’s like putting a plastic bag over a prisoner’s head then claiming their suffocation was due to “poor distribution of air”, then trying to criticize the building’s HVAC system.
There’s no HVAC system in the world that can solve the problem of a person being suffocated by a plastic bag, and there’s no economic system in the world that can solve the problem of armies actively blockading food from populations. That’s not an indication the economic system has failed; it’s an indication the political system has failed.
To my knowledge, pretty much all of the wealth gains have been in China.
It’s actually efficiently distributed, to where the profit is
Nothing efficient about throwing away food. Not even from a profit perspective.
That depends. If discarding food costs $X and distributing it to another market costs $2X guess which option is economically favourable?
The only reason that would occur would be inefficiency in distribution of product.
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Yeah, hard to truck food when the roads are in bad shape, especially since food can go bad easily.
Logistics are harder than many people think.
There are unmet food needs in our world. Too much so. But I’m not sure I would say, overall, “food is very scarce.”
Yep, I would hazard a guess the amount of food waste alone could easily feed everybody but something something profits
It's entirely a logistic issue. African countries are insanely difficult to traverse. You can have all the food in the world but we don't have a way to move the food to everyone.
I've literally worked in logistics for 20+ years, you can send shit anyway, it just comes down to cost and profits
Under capitalism, food isn’t produced to eat but to make profits. When it’s not profitable to sell, they will rather dump foods, starving the people rather than to plainly donate.
We produce enough foods to feed the entire population. But the sole purpose of food is to not feed the people, but to feed the greed of the producers, the farmers, the corporates.
Capitalism created an artificial scarcity of food where we produce too much food for the obese and throw the rest away to rot in front of the poor.
In general yeah, but let's not blame the farmers. They're shit on from so many directions it's wild - they're often locked into deals with specific companies with contracts that can sometimes cost them more money than they make. Tyson is especially notorious for this, requiring the farmers to build specific chicken houses that the farmer pays for, on land that the farmer pays for to raise chickens they're only allowed to sell to Tyson, all while Tyson can and regularly does choose not to buy the chickens if they're not selling enough. Farmers have managed to find themselves indentured servants on their own land.
It's not really scarce. If you know the amount that's thrown away
Food is far from scarce in the developed world. There's so much food that people can easily become obese, and millions of tons of food are destroyed each year.
Uhhh, yeah, no idea where the "food is scarce" came from, we've got so much food in developed countries that we could easily feed the whole world with it.
There's a lot to be said for encouraging self sufficiency. See the damage done to African textile industries from a glut of charity clothing.
Of course, in an industrial age "encouraging self sufficiency" also means making competition, and a lot of dummies start talking about bootstraps instead of supporting education and investment.
Literally the first thing that came to my mind after reading the post title.
If this wasn't linked within the first hour of this post, I would have been amazed. Such an awesome show!
Food grows on trees if your ancestors planted and cared for those trees. An apple tree that's been uncared-for for fifty years may produce nothing but nasty bug-ridden rotting inedible fruit.
Fruit trees been around longer than we have, they can care for themselves
Not the cultivated fruit trees that have been selectively bred by humans for thousands of years, no.
Yeah, they grow just fine. I dont know what you think they cant get without human care
obligatory grapes of wrath quote
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
Bold of you to assume that "that side" can / will read.
(\s btw, as I'm sure you guessed but others may not have so... just in case:-D)
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Upon learning American dollars are made from cotton:
"Money doesn't grow on trees!"
"No, but it grows on a bush!"
Turn of phrase DESTROYED by FACTS and LOGIC
More crops go to feed in animal agriculture, than crops to humans. And farmers tend to monocrop instead of utilising all the possible crops that would do well in that environment. (Retooling, investment, skills, time, industry experts, ...)
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