This is a terrible idea in my opinion, because you are going to end up subsidizing population growth in areas that aren't naturally capable of supporting that number of people. Thus you'll create a never-ending dependency on free food, which will result in even more human suffering when the free food inevitably goes away for some reason.
Ethically, this is a really frightening argument. Same argument with different words: We have to have people hungering to death to provide a disincentive for population growth.
Besides, food availability doesn't really affect population growth (upwards of a certain lower bound, of course). The most effective way to lower birthrates is readily available female education.
Not to endorse GP's point, but people move to places with income / food before they start to starve. Like, this scenario plays out a million times a day with old ladies that put a bunch of cat food outside their house, after a couple decades there's 10x as many cats living in a 100 metre radius and the lady dies and then shortly after all the cats die too, of hunger or killed by the municipality. With no old lady to begin with the cats wouldn't have starved, they'd just spread out over a larger area so that they don't have to compete over other sources of food like vermin or trash.
People who have lots of children usually don't know how to have fewer plus they fear that many of their children will die before adulthood. They also rely on their children to be their "retirement fund". All these aspects are changing across the world.
This has been observed again and again in scientific studies.
It seems to me that the prudent thing to do would be to extend this stuff to those areas. These things include better sanitation and medical care to lower mortality rates - especially among children - and making sure comprehensive sex education and contraception is both readily available and used.
This is one potential post-scarcity future: Big corporations sponsor whole villages, just on the off chance that a genius is born to that population who will then work for the corporation.
Unlike the many non-geniuses born over many centuries whose career choices were pre-determined by the social status of the family they grew up in, and the fact neither they nor [later] their parents would have anything to eat if they left the village to seek their fortune elsewhere...
And when the AI can replace those villagers? Isn't it more cost effective to just stop providing food?