> although we're doing a terrible job of distributing it to the world
Are we? Starvation and malnutrition used to be common and is now rare.
Are we? Starvation and malnutrition used to be common and is now rare.
Which is arguably just a different form of malnutrition, somewhat less deadly, but more of a chronic burden on the patient and the society.
A good example of this caution is eggs and refrigeration, for which American's and European's have opposite ways of handling things.
From a sibling comment by imtrigued:
> Almost a billion are still going hungry.
"The world is awful"
And then from your parent comment:
> Are we? Starvation and malnutrition used to be common and is now rare
"The world is better"
And finally your comment:
> it's also true that the world produces enough food such that no ones needs to starve
"The world can be much better"
These three are all true, and I suspect each person already knew all three. It's just that each person chose to focus on a separate aspect.
"The world is awful" highlights a problem that needs solving, a concrete goal
"The world is better" tells you that something is working, which you can build on top of or improve
"The world can be better" gives a proposal for a course of action
While the 3rd might seem like the most useful, the 1st is extremely important too, because if the proposal fails then you need to fall back to thinking about the problem. The 2nd is important for both motivation, and also for promoting incremental progress
The situation in 2022 is not good, it will take time to see exactly how bad.
Famine correlates very closely with war -- if our recent period of relative global peace comes to an end it will probably return with a vengeance.
Exactly how bad it will get remains to be seen. But the causes of famine are generally political and in terms of total body counts the worst ones are basically "big country X really screws up" (e.g. China and the Soviet Union in the 20th century) and/or wars and I don't think we have any guarantee that those things won't happen again.
- tens of millions died due to starvation from central planning issues (variously causing: a plague of locusts; Mao wanting to save face so refused foreign aid and maintained being a net exporter of food while people were starving; diverting people away from agriculture to metal production to meet the five year plan)
- millions died from government beatings/torturings to death, and suicide due to hopelessness and government destruction of cultural traditions in the name of centrally planned progress
Now one might say that there may have been even more harmful centrally planned economies, i.e. the USSR and Nazi Germany, but at best any of the candidates is competing to be only the third worst disaster in the history of the world.
Also I find it curious that among the possible causes you forgot to mention World War 2. What would you say if someone omitted that when explaining fifties in Europe?
If you think WW2 was a major contributor to the Great Leap Forward deaths then just explain, rather than making oblique comments about how it's strange I didn't mention the thing that you're thinking of (but not mentioning).
[0]https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...