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).
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.
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).
The hoarders have guns. They will take it all, and they will be able to recruit more with the promise of that food.
Yes, but do non-hungry people help rich people kill and rob others as well as weapons?
They never ask the right questions!
If he wanted to, Elon Musk could personally fund this five times over and still have a few billion left.
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.
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.
Good luck convincing Putin. Until that happens it isn’t like many countries in Europe can cut on military spending.
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.
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.
