What Causes Hunger?
wfp.org
wfp.org
- Land grabs: Big investors buy agriculture land to produce cash crops for export, e.g soy beans to feed pigs.
- Colonial past: Most land in 3rd world countries is owned by a few rich people. E.g. Namibia was a hunger country before 1990, but is now one of the biggest meat exporters after a successful land reform.
- Frankenfood: Monsanto and other big seed companies destroying the ability of farmers to grow their own seeds.
- Food laws: One of the first things Bremer did after invasion of Iraq was to install US food laws, basically forbidding people to sell traditional food on the market. Forcing them to buy hybrid seeds.
The base problem is: Once your neighbor starts to use Monanto and round up, the ground water and soil is poisoned and you need to grow resistant crops also. Using Frankenfood crops means that you can no longer grow your own seeds. You have to buy the expensive seeds, the expensive herbicides, and you end up in debt and poverty.
You can also no longer do classical crop rotation, once you start poisoning your field with roundup. The result is a monoculture that calls for even more fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides.
This is not limited to Frankenfood, but also to hybrid plants. So we come back to food laws, who only allow to sell crops of certain strains. Those strains that are sold by big seed companies.
Crops like corn/maize haven't been replantable in the USA since hybridization caught on in the 1940's.
I can't find anything relating to "forbidding people to sell traditional food on the market" either.
_People who reproduce when they don't have a reasonable expectation of feeding their offspring._
It seems like a whole class of possible solutions to the problem of hunger are ignored with such a tunnel vision approach to the problem.
Bill Gates has surplus millions but I'm not going to build a new garage for the Porche I can buy with all his excess money.
You claim it's the most obvious cause of hunger, but do you have anything to support that claim?
See already you're off base. Someone's individual expectation is not at all necessarily a "reasonable expectation". There are lots of gamblers in Vegas who expect to win big tonight... doesn't mean their expectations are reasonable.
but do you have anything to support that claim
What, like statistical evidence? No. I don't have statistical evidence that my car is parked outside either, but I'll still take a chance on it by walking to the spot where I left it earlier.
How should people make decisions if they can't trust their own judgment? You're going to one extreme and saying "lots of people are unreasonable". Ok, great. Lots of people are also very reasonable.
"See already you're off base."
That's just a fancy way of starting off the conversation by saying "you're wrong". No, he probably just doesn't agree with you. You should stop trying to frame everything in this objective manner. It's actually really obnoxious.
Not pointing out when someone is demonstrably wrong in a discussion is as useless and futile as pretending to want to solve poverty and hunger but not addressing the core issue.
Discussing topics like this on the Internet is already fairly useless. No sense in making it worse with a bunch of disingenuous and logically incorrect validation of opinions.
Your inability to demonstrate it has been noted.
You haven't done so.
That leads me to think that your first comment was a knee-jerk opinion with nothing to support it, and that you're continuing to defend that position because you "feel" it's correct, even though it could well be wrong.
Your weird insistence that it's right, even though you're unable to provide any evidence to support it, is odd.
I freely accept that the article I submitted is opinion - but it's informed opinion from people who work in this field. The article has links to other organisations who've published research on hunger, and the website for WFP contains a lot of their published research.
So, I'm faced with a multi-national multi-government agency with a lot of published research and many years of expertise saying one thing. And I have some random Internet commenter saying something else, and getting defensive when asked to supply any kind of citation for their claims.
At the moment I'm dismissing what you say.
But, like I said, I'm open to persuasion.
Riiiiight... like that means anything. Should it mean something that healthcare.gov is backed by the biggest government in the world yet is a piece of crap that many developers on HN could have done better on in their spare time over the last few years?
Should it mean something that these multi-national multi-government agencies have been talking about and spending huge amounts of money on "hunger" for many many decades and haven't made any progress? At what point does their extraordinary lack of success dissuade you from being such a big fan? My guess is never.
At the moment I'm dismissing what you say. But, like I said, I'm open to persuasion.
I'm sure you tell yourself that, but your credulity of a report because it's "multi-government" tells me that you're a believer in the mechanisms of the State regardless of common sense, their abject failures, and information contrary to that ideology.
If you were open to persuasion you'd be tremendously critical of the weak article this thread is based upon - regardless of whether or not you buy into my point of view.
No, but you do have evidence by just being able to go outside and observe your car. You're not operating without reason when you go back to where you left it earlier.
Your reply is written in a very condescending way. You should know that.
Just like I'm not operating without reason by pointing out that whole villages that are hungry are just making the problem worse by breeding without much restraint.
Your reply is written in a very condescending way. You should know that.
Yeah, I find it really childish to ask people for statistics as some kind of counter-attack when straightforward observations should suffice. What's your excuse for being condescending?
But they don't start from a position of being dirt poor, in a situation where they don't have land to farm.
They start with having land, and seed, and health. And then HIV/AIDS kills the family, removing a generation, leaving young children and grandparents to farm. Or there's a drought, lasting five years, destroying crops. Or there's a flood, destroying livestock. Or their main crop (eg Quinoa) becomes fashionable, driving up prices, leaving them without food.
The sentence I'm responding to is: _People who reproduce when they don't have a reasonable expectation of feeding their offspring._ but actually people are successful farmers who's life changes after multiple, year on year, disaster.
http://www.irinnews.org/printreport.aspx?reportid=94947
That article gives a pretty good overview of the multiple events that cripple farmers.
See also the slide show "Too Poor To Farm" http://www.irinnews.org/photo/?id=43
The only solution to this problem is fighting poverty, and educating women.
It's a socioeconomic phenomenon of the Industrial Age's middle class, the upper class continue to multiply like in the good old times, having 3 to 6 kids is not uncommon.
Industrial Age: fertility rates (of the middle classes) are negatively correlated with prosperity.
And as we should all know, organisms under stress, breed. Therefore, anywhere that people are hungry, the population will grow faster than places where there is too much food. No matter how much food you give to these poor people, they will grow their population to once again blow the limit of the capacity of their corner of the world to supple them with enough food.
Whose fault is that? Part of the blaim lies with enlightened rich countries who sent so much health care to these deprived areas that their death rate could no longer maintain any kind of equilibrium. And some of the fault is with rich countries who sent luxuries that these poor people could not afford. And some of the fault is elsewhere and neither you nor I will be able to figure it out.
Best thing to do is to simply ignore this stuff. You cannot help and history shows that you are likely to just make things worse. If you really want to help then focus on yourself, your life and your community. Build a sustainable local lifestyle for yourself and show the poor deprived starving people that it can be done.
Sure, let's just completely ignore the elephant in the room.
Look at a map showing the countries with the highest birth rates, and overlay it with a map showing the countries with the highest rates of hunger. You won't find a lot of difference between the two.