> lets us anticipate droughts distribution and crop failures months ahead of time.
If by “us” you mean big corporations, which will then buy the stuff and sell it at a premium later, then I agree.
If by “us” you mean big corporations, which will then buy the stuff and sell it at a premium later, then I agree.
Corporations may indeed be taking advantage of this, demanding prices so low that the farmers don't get the benefit of those subsidies. However:
> buy the stuff and sell it at a premium later
Is the point of a futures market. Futures let people trade a thing before they even know how supply and demand will balance, guaranteeing a price for the producer and letting them plan purchases of machinery and maintenance, with the risks (in bad years) and profit margins (in good years) going up the supply chain.
Can't think of many countries besides Canada and US that would not starve in NATO if such a necessity arose, and that's because they produce lots of cereals.
All the other countries in NATO are major food importers.
All apart from France, Netherlands, Spain, Denmark, Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Turkey, Italy and Ireland.
Interestingly the US is borderline now depending on how you measure food imports and exports.
The average ribeye steak you serve in your barbecue joint can feed a family of 4 in war time.
Italy is not food self-sufficient, it relies heavily on imports of cereals, animal feed, oils, and other.
We add value up the chain (with hams, cheese, etc), but bar fruits and vegetables where we are okay-ish, we cannot feed ourselves. Its been decades that even our own pasta is made out of canadian and us cereals. We simply don't have enough, let alone we don't have good quality cereals.
On top of that, our production is super reliant on imported fertilizers and chemicals. We would borderline starve in case of isolation.
Yeah, those pesky Ukrainians waging war for the pleasure of it.
But stop framing it as "defense", we've been almost exclusively the ones attacking, not defending. It's us being the bad guys.
Wars do not start by mutual agreement of all belligerents. If anything, usually the opposite.
But we also have recent history demonstrating that this will not be allowed to happen, no matter how much starvation there is in poorer countries, we WILL have our steaks. Not negotiable.
Indeed, though given Trump's behaviour I have wondered what will happen when it's poorer *US states*.
Fortunately, the farmers had a word and seem to have stopped the deportation of the undocumented (illegal) immigrants who do so much farm work.
Also fortunately, the reservoirs (that weren't even connected to where the fires in SoCal were) were not actually emptied, so my worst-case scenario at the time didn't come up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_water_release_from_Lake_K...
Long may it continue that people who can say no to bad decisions, remain able to say no. Last thing anyone in the world needs with the Eurasian breadbaskets of Ukraine and Russia destroying each other's grain export capacity is the US shooting itself in both legs with an M134.
He may do a Mugabe and reward the faithful at the expense of the nation. He may do a Pol Pot, and punish the opposition until there are none left and then turn on the faithful and only get stopped when their internal crimes against humanity cross an international border and a foreign army steps in. He may do a Stalin and deny (or be ignorant of due to all the sycophants) the existence of a problem. He may say the equivalent of "Let them eat cake" and bring a repeat of all that entails.
Based on precedent, in such a hypothetical, I suspect he will put a 1000% tariff on all food imports to raise enough money to feed everyone, which obviously won't work but he won't know that, and then complain about how unfair everyone is being.
Other countries have a lot of money and excess food too - EU, China, Brazil. I would look forward to hearing their proposals to solve hunger and to shake the hands of each volunteer and soldier and pilot/ship captain going to help feed people.
I assume this is why in really dire circumstances with unsecured territory you airdrop stuff (at the risk of crushing a few people).
At least then the people nearest get a chance at grabbing it first.
Or look at how the IDF had to stand by powerlessly as Israelis blocked supply trucks from entering the refugee camps. Or how the IDF had to indiscriminately shoot up Palestinian civilians who crowded a supply truck in Gaza. Or how the IDF had to launch targeted missile strikes against supply trucks in Gaza that had been identified to and were in continuous communication with Israeli authorities. All because Hamas forced the IDF to indiscriminately destroy practically all infrastructure in the Gaza strip, cut access to Israel-controlled utilities, lock down the border to Egypt, send a population of millions on a death march along designated routes it continued bombing, deliberately assassinate news reporters, bomb hospitals, destroy UN and NGO facilities and literally shoot hostages it mistook for Palestinians.
I have to believe you were intentionally trying to be provocative because to float "Hamas seizing food supplies for starving Palestinians" in 2026 without providing context for why those Palestinians are starving, let alone that the original claim has since pretty much been refuted, feels like a deliberate choice:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/26/world/middleeast/hamas-un...
https://www.timesofisrael.com/usaid-finds-no-proof-hamas-sys...
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israeli-officers-say-hama...
There are of course gangs stealing supplies to resell them at inflated prices on the black market but that tends to come with the territory when the only authorities in place become defunct because the entire region is turned into rubbles by a military force that considers anyone without a Jewish Israeli passport a likely terrorist unless proven otherwise.
Anyway, more on point: countries don't have excess food, economic entities do. And our economic system is generally fairly averse to making economic entities give up any property (even with fair compensation), especially when it comes to large corporations. If you want to form any plan that doesn't start with (literally) "seizing the means of (food) production", I think it would have to include the phrase "create market incentives" but I'm not sure there is a better incentive than "people are willing to give you all their money because your product has become scarce" - though of course that hinges on "all their money" being more than you make now and that doesn't tend to hold up when it comes to the resource extraction economy based parts of the world.
But anyway, they do interfere with aid [1]. Them doing it a single time ever proves my claim. But again I'm not trying to litigate the whole Israel vs Hamas war, just pointing out how it is logistically difficult. The rest of the world needs to step up across the board, specifically China and the EU as they are the other main global economic entities, countries, whatever you want to call them.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/un-official-says-hamas-obstructing-aid-gaza-2026-07-13/
And it goes back decades:
https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-209885/The IDF has done far more, larger terrorist acts for far longer.
If you want to make your own post and talk about how Israel is seizing aid as a point about how difficult it is to distribute aid and how the EU, China, and other major economies need to step up, deploy ships, send combat forces in to ensure aid delivery, &c., you’re more than welcome to.
The only thing preventing food being distributed to everybody that needs it is economics, specifically the type of economics which rewards exploitation, hording, and maldistribution. The people with power actually prefer it that way, some people being hungry is fine actually, as long as the rich and powerful in their own country gets to make more money.
Now I am not gonna dignify your genocide apologia with an answer. But you should feel ashamed to have written such hateful words right here on a tech forum.
However this 90% estimate is cherry picked. It is one report at one time, during a time when Israel was intentionally starving Palestinians during a genocide.
They could just intercept it and hoard it thus driving the price up or as a tool to recruit others into their criminal organizations.
Or maybe you can tone down the rhetoric yea?
Accusations of genocide were made before Israel’s response to Oct 7 even began, with many claiming the genocide has been going on for 80 years — the only genocide in history where the population being genocided grew exponentially during their genocide.
Even Gaza has had population growth over the past 3 years, despite the war (reported births > reported killed).
I probably should engage with these claims as they are written, but I don’t think anything here is in good faith. I am clearly engaging with somebody who is full of hate, so much so they deny (or even support) a genocide.
Also, you are arguing with bad faith assumptions regarding my views on actual genocide.
As a descendant of survivors of a real one, I’m not about to give you and your ilk my identity. You seem to think that this is something to gloat about. Good on you for feeling that your side has nothing to be afraid of — not everyone is that fortunate.
Food aid organizations were highly critical of Live-aid’s logistics, claimed it would not work because the food just gets looted by the armed factions who will use it to buy more weapons. Live-aid distribute the food anyway, and yes, a lot of it went to the armed factions, but overall food became less scarce and fewer people were hungry.
I think food is one of these things we should just not fuck around with. Wherever people need food, it should be delivered, unconditionally. The food exists, and the distribution networks exist, the only thing preventing people from getting it is most of the time money. Getting food to e.g. Darfur is very expensive (due to bribes etc.), and very few charities can afford it, governments however can afford it, but simply choice not to.
But even outside of armed conflict, where things do get messy, we are still failing people miserably. Many earthquake survivors in Indonesia are now hungry, and food is not being delivered to them. And there is absolutely no excuse why the international society is failing them (except via capitalism).
Incorrect. Capitalism isn't failing them. Capitalism is what enabled surplus food to be produced in the first place. Instead, it is governments and other international organizations that are failing to agree upon and fund the mechanism to deliver food.
"Local government distributes food relief to starving residents"
They're the same picture, it's just a judgement call on whether you see them as legitimate. Whether or not that's the case with Hamas, Israel & the US have ensured that Hamas's paramilitary wing specifically are the most legitimate of the local governing bodies, ranging from overturning Palestinian democracy when they attempted to turn into a political party 20 years ago and operating a occupation puppet government in the West Bank, to ensuring that grievances exist with regular provocations at holy sites, with embargoes, or power cuts, to literally assassinating not-explicitly-Hamas-aligned public figures who become popular in Gaza.
The nice thing about food aid is that no matter who seizes it, it's food aid. Unless they're literally lighting it on fire, its entire political power is derived from it eventually being eaten by somebody, and a warlord plus 500 tons of peanuts does not add up to a 500 ton warlord. Better: In some forms of food aid, it rapidly spoils, so its utility to the local power structure is zero if it's hoarded.
No? Not at all? They can just sell the aid which means they can sell it to anyone including folks who weren’t the intended recipients, they can hoard it and not give it away, they can let it go bad rather than give it away, they can use it to recruit soldiers to repress other people so they don’t starve, they can use it to buy slaves, there are plenty of ways in which the food aid doesn’t make it to the people who need it.
There’s no moral justification or anything to say here to help you sleep at night. When a terrorist group, local warlords, whomever steal the aid it’s just bad. Trickle down economics doesn’t work.
You are describing problems with government cheese, with directing food to means-tested registered impoverished people who live alongside the wealthy & fat.
"Folks who weren't the intended recipients" - the residents of the region were the intended recipients. Literally the first people who make it to the truck and (hopefully) form a line, is how it's usually done.
What's the economic or political benefit to spoilage?
The local power structure is already a local power structure. If your intention is that you MUST disrupt the local power structure and you're willing to exacerbate the famine to ensure that, then sure, don't distribute food aid.
No I'm not. Your characterization is wrong too. Poor people tend to be more overweight than the wealthy and also receive more food aid.
> I am describing a region under broad famine.
Sure whatever, but describe how the rest of the world (not the US) should solve the broad famine you've highlighted.
> What's the economic or political benefit to spoilage?
If you're a local warlord it would be control or to ensure certain groups or enclaves are dead or weakened. Withholding food or other resources is a strategy as hold as civilization.
> If your intention is that you MUST disrupt the local power structure and you're willing to exacerbate the famine to ensure that, then sure, don't distribute food aid.
If giving food aid just entrenches the local power structure then it just turns into a new tax of sorts that has to be paid basically forever. I stand in strong support of the countries (not the US) who would like to do this. Go for it.
Yes. The answer is yes.
See also: Welfare queens, a cartoon specter of a moral hazard, the opposition to which is so important we must simply end welfare.
Yes the local power structure is allowed to charge taxes, or taxes by other means.
> Would we rather bomb the whole place into rubble than allow them to feed the hungry?
Maybe we just don't do either and decide to do other things?
poor americans will starve outside the walls
I assure you, take one look at us and you’ll instantly see that very few of us are in any danger of starving.
Goldman-Sachs should _not_ be inserting themselves into profiting on the poor's daily bread.
https://theecologist.org/2011/sep/13/how-goldman-sachs-start...
Futures significantly pre-date your link.
If what you're upset about is claim denials those are occasionally illegitimate because insurance, like literally everything else, has the occasional bad actor. There's also a massive industry of attorneys who will work on contingency and provide legal representation to resolve that. Much more commonly, it's someone who didn't read his policy, or did but decided post-hoc what it "should" cover. He "shouldn't" have to bear the cost despite not taking out a more comprehensive policy beforehand. This isn't a "capitalism" problem; single-payer systems, generally agreed to be socialistic in nature, still don't cover some things and generally require coverage specifically to avoid people deciding they "deserve" coverage after they get sick. The other major category is things like business insurance in 2020; most policies wrote out plague after the SARS outbreak in the aughts. This isn't "insurers are evil" so much as bio risk is massively correlated which breaks a lot of things about underwriting.
Lots of "acts of god" are, in fact, covered and pay out all the time. Hail and wind and such. Things like flood aren't, because a relatively small number of people live in floodplains and they tend to not want to bear the entire risk. People who live outside of floodplains, on the other hand, don't buy flood insurance, because they don't need it. So you have a lot of adverse selection that makes it hard to insure.
Futures contracts are themselves also more developed than what was in those laws.
Accurately and fairly pricing risk is a whole field in its own right, one whose surface I have only lightly touched upon in my life by learning of actuaries and Black-Scholes. Free lunches don't tend to last long in finance, which means all profit margins everywhere, from share dividends and growth, to tresury bonds, to futures, to mortgages, tend to similar risk-adjusted real return.
The risk is inherent. Not everyone that produces a commodity wants to manage the risk associated with that commodity, as it is a very different skill set.
Which country does that? Here farmers were (very heavily) subsidised because footage of farmers walking off the land was political suicide for whichever party was in power at the time. When the subsidies were stopped by a government with a safe enough majority to be able to do it, many farmers did walk off the land. I've never heard of a government making sure there's over-production for future lean years.
I'm not so sure these days.
And what would you rather happen? If they don't store up a surplus then everyone will run out of food and prices will go up anyway. If there is less food because of a drought, prices are going up. If corporations start building up a stockpile then prices aren't going to go up as much as if there were no reserves.
TLDR; Yes. Good. It is a great day when there is food available at the local supermarket.
I'm sure he was referring to already food insecure places. The rich countries will have food available, probably at elevated prices.
In places where there's actual famine people will do crazy things to get their hands on food.
There are very limited options here. Those two are, by far, the two best ones for reliably being able to access food. Someone has to build up a reserve. Literally, you should to be able to point someone out and say "this person will give me food next month, they've got a stockpile for this drought".
Ideally that someone who is very, very motivated to get it right and make it happen. Those big corporations charging extra are going to keep people fed.
> The world is bigger than your relatives.
I offer no commentary on the size of my relatives vs. the rest of the world :)
It's either for and by the community or it's for and by a big corporation profiteering off the misfortune of the community. It can't be both at the same time.
The big corporations aren't "going to keep people fed", they will hoard and ration by wealth, not by need. The billionaire will get their twenty course fine dining experience, the beggar will starve. That's not keeping the people fed by any serious definition of the term.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGjGsyMe_F8
* https://www.cbh.com.au/about-cbh/what-we-do
Thanks to being globally remote, easily isolated and events like WWII and COVID we're picky about having reserves (seed, fuel, grain) in storage to ride out <reasonable levels of shit happens>.
Not really. Corporations are social by essence, and on a much bigger scale than anything that came before. That’s precisely what makes socialism possible.
Corporations are transactional by essence, not social. Any relationship within or with a corporation has the singular goal of making the corporation money. Food deserts exist because corporations aren't social. Supermarkets and stores aren't there feed the community, they sell food only to those who can afford it, and only for a profit. If it comes down to it they'll station cops outside the store with shotguns to keep the poors away and let the food rot on the shelves because that's how capitalism works. That's the exact opposite of everything socialism is supposed to stand for.
I know, to the US centric crowd at HN that probably sounds insane, but as a Scandinavian this is what I would have expected in the past (though probably not these days).
It isn't like anyone would be unable to afford food, because a welfare state would imply a standing agreement to buy everyone food at the taxpayer's expense if required. And it is entirely reasonable for prices to go up when there is a shortage, the people who built up stockpiles in advance need to be compensated for their foresight. Someone has to be stockpiling food.
But what I'm suggesting is that a governments should perhaps build up such stockpiles again as we move into more uncertain and less peaceful times. This can help even in case of smaller regional disasters, not every emergency is a full blown war.
Why? And it's not foresight that sets those people apart, it's having the resources to hoard the food and the ethical framework that allows them to profiteer off their fellow humans misfortune. Why should we reward that?
> Someone has to be stockpiling food.
Sure, like a government or a coop or a commune or whatever. Some institution who's interests are aligned with the community, not somebody who happens to have capital and wants to make a buck.
It does seem fair to pay enough to cover that at least.
Or we do what we've always done to war profiteers and hang them after taking their supplies, because hoarding food and expecting to be paid for it while people are dying is immoral and tends to get people a little bit pissed.
There's no fucking bet to be made that people will need to eat tomorrow, or have a house, or have water. Those are basic needs.
Not just taxes, §14 of the german basic law for example says:
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_14.html
Any property that is needed for the benefit of all (and where there is no alternative way to buy it normally etc) can be taken and redistributed.
So like a storehouse full of food, with a starving population and broken infrastructure - can be just taken and later compensated not with wartime prices, but "normal" ones. And I believe there are at least in theory some plans for that, which military trucks go to which warehouse and what are distribution centers etc.
Stockpile food communally NOT through a big corporation making a tidy profit?
Governments are also actors in this, and have incentivises on a different scale than "how much money this year?"; this remains true even when those governments are literally dictatorships, though as history has shown neither businesses nor governments (democratic nor dictatorship) are correct at all times, so it's nice we've also got super-national aid programs.
So who is going to be able to afford that bag of flour?
Further the African subsistence farmer has lost their harvest, so they don't even have that dollar.
The rich will always be able to outspend the poor. Making things uniformly more expensive doesnt change that. The west will continue to have an obesity epidemic while the poorest starve.
> Ideally that someone who is very, very motivated to get it right and make it happen. Those big corporations charging extra are going to keep people fed.
They (a corporation) are motivated, by profit. Meaning some people will remain fed because they can afford it. The rest will not be fed. I simply don't think that's ethical.