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).
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).
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”
Distributing agricultural surplus at market rate relative to population demand rather than market demand.
Firstly, no.
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,
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.
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
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.
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