We do have enough food to feed the world, but that would mean your food gets more expensive as other people consume what would otherwise contribute to downward supply pressure.
Your argument only makes sense if the excess food is given to people who can afford it and just want to eat for free.
Idaho potatoes were mentioned above. They are only being thrown away because the market does not want them. The mechanism by which this happens is price: prices drop low enough that it’s cheaper to throw away (we saw negative oil prices recently). One explanation is that other farmers saw this supply glut and raced to slash their prices. If we took all those excess potatoes and gave them away, then absent this excess supply, those other farmers would not have done this and prices would have remained steady or not gone down as much. Thus the artificial increase in quantity demanded is necessarily inflationary.
The risk that these potatoes might be dumped into the market pushed prices down. If you magically take this risk away, it doesn’t matter by which mechanism, that threat goes away and price responds.
If I’m another potato farmer and all of a sudden all those extra potatoes are teleported somewhere else, I will in all likelihood raise my prices.
Even the most progressive theorists would not debate this. It’s basic aggregate supply and demand.
Okay, so then we have absolutely no idea in which way the demand curve will curve then. If the demand curve can be any polynomial, then we have no clue if this will happen or not.
But it’s irrelevant anyway: a basic tenet of economics is that people are, in aggregate, utility maximizers. So yes, we do have an idea of some fundamental properties of the demand curve and it cannot simply be any polynomial.
And this is the portion that I'm critiquing. You're holding it as a constant curve sloping downwards.
> So yes, we do have an idea of some fundamental properties of the demand curve
Okay, sure, it relies on there being people who have demand for some commodity.
> it cannot simply be any polynomial
"Any polynomial" might be overselling it, but we can't assume it's sloping downwards.
There seem to be two different scenarios being conflated here.
You describe producers acting in response to the risk of future price changes.
It seems to me that others in the thread are describing a scenario where product is discarded because the price has already fallen so far that it is no longer profitable after accounting for various processing costs (ie things such as packaging and transportation).
In the latter scenario, if someone were to foot the bill for the redistribution itself there should be no direct effect on that specific part of the market. This assumes of course that the producers aren't compensated for the redistributed good (so it isn't significantly different than simply disposing of it). It also assumes that people don't resell or otherwise barter the product they receive (it's food and they're presumably starving so that assumption seems fairly reasonable in this case). (And of course there are bound to be countless indirect effects on the market as a whole.)
I understand what people are saying. Unfortunately this just isn’t how things work. If there were a way for this to occur, prices would respond. Ultimately markets aggregate information and package it up in a single metric we call price. If all of a sudden there was a new future demand for some good, no matter how you frame it, prices will respond.
Obviously this includes a number of assumptions which might not hold. The redistributed product can't reenter the market. It must only go to those who otherwise could not have purchased it or an equivalent in the near term. The total value being redistributed must be insignificant relative to the market as a whole (to limit secondary effects). Etc.
> markets aggregate information and package it up in a single metric we call price
In terms of the movement of information, product that would otherwise have been destroyed seems irrelevant. Consumers who were otherwise incapable of consuming seem irrelevant. Am I missing something?
Additionally they may be able to count the discarded product in a business loss category that yields a better tax write-off or qualifies them for assistance in a way that straight donation doesn’t.
To me your example feels like a Chesterton’s Fence scenario where government involvement is responsible for disincentivizing the common sense option of donating a surplus.