1billionhungry.org

On October 20 2010 21:34 SCC-Faust wrote:
I read something recently that the problem with hunger isn't overpopulation.
Despite that is what people are being told, we have more than enough food.

The problem is the inaccessibility to it - poverty, war, etc.

On October 20 2010 21:41 iPlaY.NettleS wrote:
sure , take action by sending them farm equipment and seeds and getting them to grow it themselves.heck send some experts over there to teach the locals if need be , it would work out cheaper in the long run.

giving them free food just undermines local farmers , who would pay (or barter etc) when they could get food for free?

On October 20 2010 21:48 Rabbitmaster wrote:
This sounds great in principle, but is kind of undermined by corrupt governments, corporate greed etc. Why would the, lets say somalian, farmer sell his food to the poor and starving people in his country, when europeans/americans/whatever can pay much more for it? Or do you want every single starving person to become a farmer?

On October 20 2010 21:46 roflpie wrote:
Great, so they can breed even more and you get more hungry people. It'll come to a point where the planet can't sustain that many people. I don't mind helping out places that have lived through a major catastrophe, but in most of the cases the people are responsible for their own hunger and have brought it upon themselves and foreign food aid is just amplifying it. For example the farmers who try to do some farming in some places of Africa find it ultimately pointless, because no one will buy their goods due to foreign food aid. Teach them proper farming techniques so you'll have even faster population growth? No, thanks. 20 billion people living packed in cities is just plain ugly.

On October 21 2010 00:41 Haemonculus wrote:
Well a lot of the locals do farm... but not for themselves. Let's look at Zimbabwe for example. They have a LOT of farm land. But most of it grows peanuts strictly for export to America and Europe so that we can go down to the local super market, and pick up a bottle of peanut oil for $3.

It makes sense for the farmers. Peanuts are the crop they can sell for the most. However, years of planting peanuts in the same soil turns the soil horridly barren, and causes a lack of food. A poor country such as Zimbabwe, with plentiful farmland, is IMPORTING its food, and exporting what it grows. Thousands of people are starving because instead of growing food for themselves and their families to eat, they are growing crops that we, (lumping all of the "1st world" together), have told them to over the years.

Name a product that you take for granted. Somewhere out there in the world is a family or country getting royally screwed over trying to produce it for you. Sure we can say that we sympathize, or wish things were better, but honestly until we're willing to give up the incredibly cheap goods that we're used to, our demand on the market only serves to worsen the situation.

On October 21 2010 02:01 Romantic wrote:

Zimbabwe has problems because it has a broken and corrupt government, redistributed land from competent white farmers, has government spending at 60% of GDP and finances it through inflating the currency, participated in wars with the Congo, has massive taxes, and is being sanctioned by the United States combined with droughts in neighboring nations.

Cash crops are not a bad thing. That is the silly. We are not exploiting anyone by going to a grocery store and buying peanuts from Zimbabwe and plastic toys from China. Do you know what they did before they worked in the factory making plastic toys? Lived and died trying to survive on subsistence-level farms on land they likely didn't even own themselves.

On October 21 2010 02:40 Haemonculus wrote:

Cash crops are great for the government, and the guys who run farms. They're pretty awful for the peasant farmers.

Again, we as the 1st world have a lot more to do with this than we like to believe. It's easy to point at the corrupt government and say "it's all those jerks' fault", but our influence is staggering. For example, we subsidize their cash crops. We give them farming technology, hybridized seeds, genetically altered crops, fertilizer, etc, but only for cash crops. We quite frankly don't give a shit about their millet crop, which the locals will then use to feed themselves. Coffee, Tobacco, Sugar, Cotton, etc. Those are the products that *we* care about, and so those are the farms that get our aid. We happily send equipment and aid to farms which grow the crops we want them to.

Cash crops are fantastic for the guys in charge. They control the crops at the end of the day, and sell them to the USA, EU, and Asia, making quite a profit. A lot of that profit goes into these warlord's personal military expenditure, or is spent on western luxuries. This system of supporting cash-crop farms over sustenance farms would work great if the local governments were as benevolent as we'd like them to be. Like you said, corruption is rampant. But we still support such a system because it allows us the goods we've become accustomed to.

It comes down to what you consider success. Do we want to see the peasant farmers feeding themselves and their families while the country's GDP falls, or do we want to see the peasants starve while the nation reports record profits, with the upper class coming closer to what we consider a "reasonable standard of living"? It sucks whichever way you look at it. We just need to decide whether or not we value the lives of the working poor in these countries.

At the end of the day though, roughly 30,000 children under the age of 6 will starve to death worldwide every day. With numbers like that, it's hard to care about the individual, and so a government's swelling purse may well look like a step in the right direction.