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Comment by Humorist2290 | Hacker News Reader

So focusing on the details of the situation in Gaza is quite awful. The general tone of the comments in this thread, along with basically any public forum I think speaks for the reverberation of human suffering throughout this -- civilians are being made into casualties, Israeli and Palestinian, and it's terrible.

Taking a broader perspective, large parts of the human race have come to realize famine is a relic of the past. Modern agriculture, synthetic fertilizer, and the technology of the last 100+ years has made famine optional. There is without a doubt the technological capacity to supply every person on earth with food and clean water. Nobody needs to go hungry to feed every person in Gaza. The same could be said of Sudan, or Bangladesh, or Haiti.

200 years ago, famine was usually a natural disaster; now it is almost exclusively a political choice.

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Famine is political, always. The world produces a significant excess of food. The only reason famine exists is because one group of people is perfectly happy to starve another group of people. Gaza is not unique here although Gaza is a aprticularly egregious example of industrial mass starvation and death at the hands of a highly-developed military and state actor.

I can't disagree. Modern famine is a tool used to cause harm indiscriminately. It is a testament to the human capacity for cognitive dissonance that so many people can be against the starvation of children yet support politicians responsible for mass starvation.

Though my point was more about considering the historical context. Famines used to happen all the time but largely because of crop failures. That famine is _caused_ has become common knowledge is, I think, at least an improvement. ~All~ Most of the famines that could've happened for the old reasons haven't.

Admittedly, I'm grasping at straws to avoid dwelling on the horrid situation at hand.

You make a good point, and it extends to other disasters besides famine. As humans we have evolved to the point where there are certain problems that we can eliminate -- starvation being one of them as you pointed out -- thanks to technological solutions. And yet, we deliberately choose not to. There are millions of people who die each year whose deaths are wholly preventable -- we have the technology and the resources to prevent them (without harming anyone else) -- but we choose not to, mostly so that some relatively small group of people can amass more wealth than they need. Humans have always been that way, I suppose, but never have these solutions been more within our grasp and yet, we choose not to use them. It's a terrible indictment against the human race.

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