Ending hunger by 2030 would cost just $93 billion a year — less than one per cent of the $21.9 trillion spent on military budgets over the past decade, according to the UN World Food Programme (WFP).
The challenge here is that it takes more than money to solve world hunger.
You also need some way to prevent the greedy from hoarding food and using it as a weapon to subjugate others, keeping them hungry.
As usual, the problem isn’t lack of food or lack of money, it’s greedy people not wanting to share.
Remembering when the Live Aid food was left to rot.
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1985/07/13/Food-rotting-in-Ethiopia-report-says/7042490075200/
Or, like, US aid just this year
Or, like, humanitarian aid headed to Gaza right now.
US aid? Not USA ID?
Uh good one
Well some people don seem to realize what USAID stands for, and parrot the corporate media saying “U S aid” all the time. Like it’s a benevolent thing. XD
This has been the problem since time immemorial. If you have a solution, you are a better person than I.
What if we sent so much food that the hoarders couldn’t hoard it all? Just a metric assload of food. Eventually food is so cheap and plentiful the hoarders give up.
You flood their market with cheap food and you put all their domestic farmers out of business.
Dumping charity on developing countries rarely works. You need to help them invest in their economy. This was shown with that micro loans paper (which won a Nobel prize).
Yup. Goods aid is only a very short-term measure. Vaccines for example expire if not stored correctly and used promptly.
Service aid is more effective medium-term, such as when the BBC World Service ran their health advisory bulletins during the W African Ebola outbreak.
Investment aid is the long-term solution, with the goal of a sustainable uplift in living standards, such as aid money being spent on the Indian space programme which allows satellites to monitor landslides and direct assistance safely.
Food should never have been a buisness in the first place.
Also areas that are struggling with food shortage and famine don’t really have for profit farmers. You’ll find that the majority are subsistence farming and maybe sell a little bit of excess. The exception would be those in these places that own a ton of land and have the money to farm at scale. Remaining food needs typically come from wealthier nations producing excess food at scale.
Ideally the state should produce staple crops at scale. Keep the people fed. This frees up subsistence farmers to engage in other economic sectors or employs them through the state to produce food. Either way it’s more reliable and more people get to eat. For the for profit farmers they could simply focus crops that aren’t staples.
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If farming is not allowed to be a business then everyone has to be a subsistence farmer, by definition.
If you read my comment you’d not be saying this.
Clearly I mean food production shouldn’t be only for profit. We should produce enough food as a service.
Frankly you are using the most obtuse way to define buisness. While I’m sure it’s technically correct, it’s not the only way that term is used and you’ve basically made an argument over something that clearly wasn’t the point.
You’re forgetting (or don’t know in the first place)
No it’s purely irrelevant. I didn’t see the need to specify you need to grow crops suitable to land/region. This point is so bad I’m starting to believe you asked AI to make an argument for you.
By centralizing farming decisions you make it more likely to have a catastrophic crop failure country-wide.
Not if you listen to experts. Kinda funny how you believe that corporations can grow crops no issue, but the state can’t. Corporations already produce most of the global food supply.
Most people new to farming fail at it
Not if you listen to experts
This is also why, for example, the Soviet Union experienced such terrible famines
Because they didn’t listen to experts. Also did you already forget we were talking about regions already under famine conditions?
Large corporations are guilty of this too, except they have a strong profit motivation so they find ways to preserve the knowledge they need to maintain profitability
So it’s totally possible for the state to do it too. Corporations prioritize profit that’s why we burn crops to keep prices stable.
Anyway, states don’t have a profit motive so they have no incentive whatsoever to preserve knowledge
You came to an inherently untrue conclusion. The state can be motived just to take care of its citizens. That’s what we should aim for.
So basically you made an argument that is overall unrelated, relies on the assumption the state must always fail, and that corporations are good. I’m unconvinced to say the least
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The hoarders have guns. They will take it all, and they will be able to recruit more with the promise of that food.
Maybe the solution is more peacekeeping forces to ensure the food output from the local farmers isn’t stolen, destroyed or hoarded.
As usual, the problem isn’t lack of food or lack of money, it’s greedy people not wanting to share.
At this point, it’s white nationalists who want people to die. From Gaza to Haiti to Afghanistan, engineered famines are a tool of the powerful to subjugate and exterminate their geopolitical rivals.
Well you’d think they would include that in the calculation.
It doesn’t make good headlines though.
If he wanted to, Elon Musk could personally fund this five times over and still have a few billion left.
Didn’t he brag a while ago he’d do it if someone came up with a plan and then WHO (or UN or whoever) did and Elmo suprisingly didn’t do anything?
YUP.
You’re misremembering, or lying.
Musk replied to a claim by the UN that 2% of his wealth ($6 billion, at the time) could “solve world hunger”, calling their bluff by saying that if they showed him how that was possible with a detailed, transparent plan, he’d give them the money immediately.
The response Musk got was a massive backpedal, a plan that described helping world hunger, not ending/“solving” it, and only for one year.
Bluff was successfully called.
Musk responded on Twitter, writing, “If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it.”
As in “if you can provide a perfect solution to a very complex global problem in 140 characters or less then I’ll see what’ I can find in my couch”. I can make that promise too, difference being that no one will try to defend me for being pedantic and just think that I’m an idiot.
Thinking about this tho…he’d probably do it. He’s a narcissist, it would boost his ego immensely and give him even more of a platform to stand on and pretend he’s good and funny internet guy
There’s a line of people who would do that if someone could craft a fool-proof plan to end world hunger. That’s big enough ego boost for many, problem is just that there is no such solution which would need just a boatload of money to complete. World Food Program gave him a reasonable proposal which would’ve made an absolutely life changing difference for millions of people but that wasn’t good enough for him.
A URL linking to a fully fleshed-out plan can be linked in much less than 140 characters, you’re being deliberately obtuse, and also evading the main issue I pointed out, that their response was a colossal backpedal from their initial sensational claim.
Posting on Twitter on Sunday, the Tesla chief executive said: “If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6 billion will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it.”
“But it must be open source accounting, so the public sees precisely how the money is spent,” he added.
Beasley replied to Musk’s post on Twitter, saying he could assure the billionaire that the WFP had the systems in place for transparency and open source accounting.
“Your team can review and work with us to be totally confident of such,” he said.
“$6 billion will not solve world hunger, but it WILL prevent geopolitical instability, mass migration and save 42 million people on the brink of starvation. An unprecedented crisis and a perfect storm due to Covid/conflict/climate crises,” he added.
CNN.
He word-for-word demanded detailed explanation on a twitter thread, not linked document. Also, even if the proposal give might not have solved the world hunger crisis that amount of work would have made him the biggest benefactor on the planet by a pretty decent margin and there would be statues of him around and schools would teach about that single event. But no, the plan wasn’t immediately perfect so he just ditched it and left 42 million (and who knows how many more due to multiplier effects) people on their own fate.
But I guess ‘bluff’ was called and everyone clapped their hands.
You are definitely not beating the “deliberately obtuse” allegations.
In no way did Musk insist that the entire plan be tweeted in plain text as tweets, and no reasonable person would consider putting a link to X (pardon the pun) in a Twitter thread as not counting as ‘putting X in a Twitter thread’.
“not linked document” is literally a lie, why would you think it wouldn’t be identified as such, when his exact words are so readily available?
Did you miss the words “a year”?
Did you miss “by 2030”?
No, I just know it’s ridiculous to think food is something that magically stops costing money after a time, especially a time as short as 4 years.
That’s really not how most organisations go about solving the problem. They aid by creating and developing agricultural infrastructure, not just buying people food.
They aid by creating and developing agricultural infrastructure, not just buying people food.
I include all of that when I say “food” above. Those things also don’t have a cost that goes away after a handful of years.
The headline talks about “ending hunger by 2030”, not ending hunger until 2030. The notion that any fixed dollar amount of X spent now will/could “end” hunger in 4 years time is ridiculous, full stop.
I don’t think you’re quite grasping the concept of sustainable food production.
Do you think this is some new idea that hasn’t been tried yet, or something?
The people still starving are starving due to abuse, neglect, political instability, and war. None of those things can be fixed with money, or improved production. What good is improved production going to do the masses when the local warlord takes control of it (and therefore the food supply)? Arguably, creating those tools in areas where that unrest/instability still exists is likely to make things worse, not better, because it literally makes the oppressors more efficient.
The bottom line is that you can’t end world hunger until/unless there is world peace.
Then maybe you should read the article because it does not make your straan claim at all.
Moving military funds into food aid would be extra effective considering that world hunger is largely created by military spending.
Yup.
Wall street destroy 7 times as much wealth as they extract from us.
Military’s unfathomably more times than that.
Poverty’s very expensive too.
So even a little shifted from military to ending poverty (especially hunger & starvation), moves the line on the graph substantially.
To the prosperity of each and all.
*Less than 10%
You can’t say it costs X per year but then use a decade for the other number.
I don’t think these numbers quite add up. It says $93B a year, vs $21.9T over a decade. So that’s $2.19 per year, or a a bit over 20 times as much. So fixing hunger costs slightly less than 5% of the world’s military budget.
Still a more worthy way to spend that money, but let’s get the numbers correct.
Yeah but without world hunger there’d be less justification for military spending. Lockheed needs its milkies, mommy
Mmmmmmmommy milkers numnumnum
-Lockheed Martin, lobbying Congress to build the more expensive but technically less capable F35, probably
The global military spending is increasing every year, so it wasn’t $2.19T every year. In 2024 it was $2.7T. $93B amounts to about 3.4% of that. Not perfect, but fairly close.
$2.19 per year
Well, glad you did the maths. That’s much more affordable.
Well shit I got it this year guys, no worries
I got tree fiddy to donate
… it’s just a ride. And we can change it any time we want. It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money. Just a simple choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one. Here’s what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride: Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace. – Bill Hicks
Also:
‘By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing…kill yourself….There’s no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan’s little helpers.’ - Bill Hicks
Ah the anti advertising angle. That’s a good angle!
Biiiig dollar!
YUS!
That’s the very line (and the rest of that bit) that got me out of advertising.
For the whole of the 3 months I was animating my first TV advert, I played a Bill Hicks VHS over and over in the background, wearing it out to snow.
Bill Hicks saved me, by telling me to kill myself. :)
Marketing and advertising are like enchantment spells in fantasy. Theoretically they have beneficial uses but for some reason the only thing we can think to do with them is try our best to remove consent and be generally intrusive.
Speak softly and carry a big stick. Unfortunately we’ve in the real world, and in the real world the only people who matter are those with nukes. See ukraine for just one example.
Blessed are the meek.
Capitalism kills.
Yep. Non-capitalist countries are famous for not having militaries.
Tbf there is a giant boogeyman-like entity out there threathening to invade them and spread capitalist freedom in return for natural resources like oil and outsourced workers.
And boogeyman’s military is so huge 5% of the upkeep could end world hunger.
Yep, BEST Korea on average shorter than South Korea due to food shortages.
an average 3–8cm (1.2–3.1 inch) difference
Shorter life expectancy by 12 years due to famines in late 1990s.
Yet their active military personnel & resources exceed South Korea’s.
text alternative: Military Might
North Korea South Korea Active Personnel Total 1,190,000 630,000 Army 1,020,000 495,000 Navy 60,000 70,000 Air force 110,000 65,000 Paramilitary 189,000 4,500 ___ ___ ___ Reserves 5,700,000 4,500,000 ___ ___ ___ Tanks 3,500 2,434 Aircraft 545 567 Submarines 73 23 Artillery 21,100 11,000 Source: The Military Balance 2017, IISS
4ᵗʰ largest army despite 52ⁿᵈ largest country by population.
Military spending is estimated to account for as much as 25% of GDP
Socialism is when government does stuff. Capitalism is when bad things happen.
Do you think being embargoed and blockaded by the majority of the world might have an impact on food availability?
I’m failing to see how militaries existing has anything to do with capitalism starving people to death because it’s not profitable.
Um excuse me, these fighter jets aren’t going to bomb children by themselves, we need all the money we can get.
No shit. Famine has been a policy decision for decades at this point. We’re past the point of scarcity where anyone would ever need to starve, so starvation in today’s world is a direct result of other people’s decision to have them starve. It’s evil.
But that’s alright. Those very same people are ensuring that times of scarcity are returning.
I think people underestinate the logistic hurdle behind making the food available for everyone.
We produce enough calories for sure, but delivering the extra meatball from my plate on the arctic circle to the plate of starving kid in the South Sudan is not that simple.
For effectivelly to end famine in everywhere need to make a massive push to train locals to farm effectivetely and get working infrasturcture for them to farm, process and deliver the produce where it needs to go. It would need full cooperation from the leaders in those countries to be effective and in unstable countries in africa and middle-east its not given.
Also many places where the famine is a problem there are also other hurdless like not having enouhg arable land or landscape that makes it impossible to make farm land. Those places need to rely on food deliveries where fossil fuel use and product shelf live would be one new hurdle.
This all while, not easy, is doable, but it would need long term planning and unwavering support from larger countries and in the current situation where USA is in a tug of war, where after every election new leader spends 4 years in undoing the last leaders decitions, India has its own problems, China is doing their their own thing and Russia is doing their best to make world as unstable as they can, while EU has their own problems, i dont see how we could do it.
If solving hunger world wide would be so easy as some people think it is, it would be done allready.
The bottom line is that you can’t solve world hunger until you solve world peace.
And peace can’t be bought.
Easy and simple aren’t the same thing.
We have the production and we have the resources, the thing we’re lacking is the will to make it happen. The people in South Sudan are so distant from me here in Sweden that they might as well be ants in someone’s back yard. Hell, the ants in someone’s back yard might actually be of more import to said someone.
The societies we’ve created just simply don’t care, and that’s where the problem lies.
I understand whole handedly what you mean and i agree that we could do more, but i find it extremely naive.
The production and recources does not matter as long as they are in wrong place and we lack the infrastructure to either move the products so it does not drain the coffers dry, or can get reliable production on site.
I once heard someone say that until very recently, mankind has not been able to produce enough food for everyone. So the question of how to get that supply everywhere it needs to be, is still a new problem.
I think that is an encouraging and exciting problem to have, but it’s still a problem.
So much fuckery impeding farmers.
Alleviate that, and we have so much headroom.
That is true. Im not expert, but new machinery, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides are the reason why we can produce so much right now, but all those come with a downsides.
Machinery is resource intensive and uses mainly fossil fuels. Electric machinery is a possibility, but it recuires rare elements and requires specialized training to make and repair.
Synthetic fertilizers need also minerals and can be almost as nasty for enviroment, same with pesticide.
I try to be optimistic, but without big leaps in technology i dont think we cant keep producing food like this forever without destroying the enviroment even more.
With global warming and the damage turning wild land in to farm land causes i think that even if we could fix global hunger now, i dont think it would last.
But that does not mean we should not aspire to do it.
But how can apes establish dominance over other apes without proper funding?
Yeah, but fuck the poor. What have they ever done for society, other than all of the essential work that civilization collapses without?
We should be making more world-ending bombs instead.
Why is an annual figure being directly compared to an “over the past decade” figure?
You missed the “by 2030” part, indicating that what’s being compared to the decade of military spending is the overall, not yearly, cost.
Food continues to be a need more than 4 years from now. That’s not an “end”.
Did you read anything but the title? The investment mentioned would guarantee thay nobodu starves from 2030 onwards. Food for everyone would become the new normal. We already produce more food than humanity needs, we just waste a huge amount of it. Moving production around and creating new transporrt routes are not ongoing costs.
Did you read anything but the title?
So you’re essentially admitting to the headline being misleading. We can agree on that.
Moving production around and creating new transporrt routes are not ongoing costs.
It’s also not the reason world hunger still exists.
Slightly philosophical question, but what does “ending world hunger” mean? Spending 1% of military budget to feed everyone once? Hiring lifelong farmers to build out fields and grow food? Would not food security lead to higher birth rates, which would eventually lead to higher food requirements, when sometimes it already feels somewhat unsustainable? I’m just confused at the meaning behind “ending world hunger”
what does “ending world hunger” mean?
Distributing agricultural surplus at market rate relative to population demand rather than market demand.
Would not food security lead to higher birth rates
Firstly, no.
The higher the degree of education and GDP per capita of a human population, subpopulation or social stratum, the fewer children are born in any developed country.[
Pulling people out of starvation tends to reduce family sizes, as people don’t plan their families with the expectation of high levels of child mortality.
Secondly, “you need to starve to death because we’re afraid you might live long enough to have kids” is a fucked public policy on the scale of Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Finally,
lead to higher food requirements, when sometimes it already feels somewhat unsustainable?
Sustainability is a consequence of land use policy, not population rate. India and China are the classic case studies of this in practice. But you can see the pattern repeated across the planet.
Vegetarian agriculture is significantly less taxing on the ecology than animal agriculture. When you compare arable land requirements per Ethiopia, Bangledish, or Thailand residents to the dietary demands of Americans, Israelis, or Argentinians, what you discover is the enormous toll animal farming takes.
The unsustainable clear cutting of jungle and near-malicious misuse of limited irrigation drives up costs and cripples availability in even the wealthiest (and most thinly populated) nations on Earth.
Meanwhile, significantly more populace regions can thrive on a primarily vegetarian diet.
Secondly, “you need to starve to death because we’re afraid you might live long enough to have kids” is a fucked public policy on the scale of Israeli genocide in Gaza.
I feel the need to defend myself and say that this was not my thinking process. My perspective was purely based on places like China and India. I doubt many are actually starving, but would not you say that the population itself is a bit too much for the region and long term sustainability? Maybe I’m indeed wrong and this is not a problem
My perspective was purely based on places like China and India.
During the famine of the 1960s, China’s population numbered around 400M and it was the poster child for “overpopulation”.
Sixty years later, they’ve functionally eliminated food insecurity. Nobody in China goes hungry because the shelves are bare. Their population now stands at 1.3B.
Maybe I’m indeed wrong and this is not a problem
Industrial agriculture has dramatically increased the agricultural productivity of post-WW2 China and India in the same way it transformed Europe and the US half a century earlier. Modern fertilizers, irrigation techniques, and ecological protective measures combined with industrial era logistics and transportation have ended the threat of famine at the national level… at least for the time being (squints at the impacts of climate change).
What famines we see in the modern era are fully the consequence of human policy. They’re either collateral damage - wars in Ukraine and Sudan and the Congo that disrupt agricultural and human traffic - or a deliberate consequence of imperial foreign policy - the '91 famine in North Korea, the famine in Iraq following Operation Desert Storm, the blockade of Cuba, the segregation of Hispaniola into Haiti and Dominican Republic, the genocide in Gaza.
What the article illustrates is the relative ease by which these huge (sometimes deliberate) logistical failures of food trade could be solved with a tiny appropriation of the military budgets that (sometimes deliberately) create them.
Yeah, all good points. I guess it really comes down to selfishness
It says 96b, less than 1% of military spending over the last decade, which imo is a misleading way of framing things. It would then be approximately 10% of average annual military expenditure over the last decade.
Looks like a larger slice of the military spending pie so looks less like news. But it’s what it is.
Also lifting regions out of nutritional poverty has knock on effects on development, education and general economic participation. It’s an absolute win all around. Even for shareholders as market size and productive, sustainable and educated labour pool grows.
The rest of the military budget should be used for education, infrastructure and environmental protection. They are all absolute wins.
That’s a good question, followed by a lot of bad assumptions.
Excuse me for being skeptical, but I’ve been hearing about ending world hunger for 3 decades now, and if it’s as easy as moving only 1% of the military budget, then… I just feel like there’s more to this than media tells us on the surface level
so your are suspicious the military industrial complex is not willing to part with billions to gift away?
yeah, that sure is evidence they do not think ending world hunger is not feasible and not evidence of greed and corruption, no sir
1%
That’s billions already
Like how much to shift the incentives
God doesn’ t want us to feed people, he wants armageddon.
That explains a lot with the revelations book.
Revelations is a revenge fantasy of an oppressed minority (Roman age Christians) aimed at the occupying imperial army (Rome).
It can be summarized as “When Rome fails, the world will end and everyone will get what they deserve”.
Meanwhile, there’s an extensive prior catalog of religious texts in the New Testament that absolutely do tell you to share the wealth, care for your neighbors, and pursue a utopian paradise free from inequality in God’s name.
I don’t remember Zeus saying anything like that.
Sieg Heil!
Oh, wait. No, that was the other guy. I get them mixed up a lot, cause they are both such twats.
Solving world hunger isn’t a money problem, it’s a corruption problem, especially outside of 1st world countries.
For every dollar moved out of the military to “solve world hunger” i bet less than 10 cents would actually make it to food someone can eat, and the total always referenced as this much would solve it.
In which case, it’s not 1%, it’d be more like 10%.
