Not Good Economics To Stop World Wide Starvation?

There are a lot of starving people in he world, including the US. There are many programs which attempt to feed them. It has been said that American Farmers could feed the world. New technology and farming practices can produce massive amounts of food. (Those huge corn nuts come from massive ears of corn. We can grow huge tomatoes, millions of tons of apples, huge watermelons and great pumpkins.)

However, after watching assorted financial and farm reports, reading up on price fixing from the Citizens Against Government Waste site, finding out about increases in seed, fertilizer and fuel prices, I’ve come to a conclusion.

We can wipe out hunger everywhere. Not just us, but other agricultural nations. We can feed the world. We can provide everyone with beef, pork, chicken and lamb. (Not fish. We keep on insisting on over fishing the grounds and then complaining about low harvests.)

It is just not financially feasible.

Farm markets are based on buying rates. From the price of a crop comes money for seed, fertilizer, last years loans and fuel. A huge crop of corn drops the price per bushel, so the farmer has to sell more and his profit drops. (Prices in the consumer end – say for a loaf of bread, however, do not drop. The seller pockets the savings in wholesale prices.)

Too many bushes of, say, apples, on the market drops the buying price. Consumers may benefit somewhat from the bumper crop, but Farmers, in order to make ends meet, often will not pick most of their crops. They’ll let it rot in the fields. (There are not enough food salvage organizations to gather all of this free food for the local poor.)

A cattleman might bring a herd in to sell at 50 cents a pound. Too many cattle and he’ll get 25 cents. Next year he will produce less salable cattle to keep his prices up in order to make a livable profit. (Not that the general public will ever get the benefit of cheap beef again thanks to the grocery stores.)

So, it actually, thanks to inflation, some price fixing, the increase in supply costs and fuel along with interest rates, is not economically feasible to produce cheap food. As a result of the economy, people must starve to death and others live on a substandard diet.

What do you think?

I think the problem is distribution, not production.

American farmers can produce beaucoup chickens, beef, corn, wheat, etc., but who is going to get it to where it needs to go? Who is going to ship it? Distribute it? Deal with the international bureacracy (sp?)? Who is going to make sure that 3000 pounds of Minnesota milk is going to be drinkable when it gets to, e.g., Sudan?

American farmers are blessed with many things. Chief among them is the effiecient manner in which everything from milk to strawberries to celery to cilantro gets to the corner grocery.

what’s da big deal with food? Food is a commodity like any other. If you have money you can buy it, if you don’t you can’t. The world can produce anything if there’s a demand, whether it be tomatoes or CD players but if you can’t pay for it you can’t have it. The people who can’t afford food can’t afford most anything else. Why are we making such a deal about food? The problem is not feeding the hungry, the problem is getting them to produce something so they can feed themselves. Anything else is a waste of time and effort.

The problem isn’t lack of food, but overproduction of infants. China has the right idea in limiting family size.
If they weren’t communist, we might give them more credit for giving the world another decade to work on this problem.

I have to agree with the OP–for those of us in the, ahem, First World, who use/control most of the resources in the whole world, everything boils down to our prime directive, make money. It is not a wise investment to prevent people from starving, if you define wisdom as that which leads to more money. Distribution is a problem, but not so much so that we are unable to feed our own hungry here at home. Again, it’s about what makes financial sense.

We could easily feed the world. The same cattleman in the OP could funnel his resources into producing grain instead of meat (we don’t send steaks to starving folks) and feed at least ten times as many people. We could feed the world. But we’re greedy, and we’re lazy, and we’ve got better and more profitable things to do.

Yeah, forced abortions are a great way for a country to limit the size of families.

Marc

      • Uh, no. Not anywhere, ever. There isn’t anyplace that is suffering from “overpopulation”, that also is not controlled by restrictive laws on the production and distribution of goods. — Here’s an easy current example:
        N. Korea has 24 million+ people on 47,xxx sq. miles of land. Per-capita GDP (1998) was $914.
        S. Korea has almost 46 million people on 38,xxx sq. miles of land. Per-capita GDP (1998) was $13,000.
        Communist North Korea is starving, republican South Korea isn’t. Same region, same weather, same resources - different laws. (S. Korea’s population density is more than twice as high as N. Korea’s)
      • And the world is not “running out of places for people to live”, and we won’t run out for a long time. Drive across Kansas. Or Arizona. Or Nevada. Or Oklahoma. Or Greenland. Or northern Canada. Or sub-Saharan Africa. Or the Russian interior. Granted, they’re not real great places to have to live, but you could probably get used to it if it was there or death.
      • As per-capita incomes increase, birthrates go down.
      • And it isn’t forced abortions; abortions are expensive, silly. Usually the mother delivers the newborn full-term and then suffocates it by covering its face with a pillow or blanket. Sweet dreams. - MC

Sequent said:

We, the United States, as well as other sovereign nations, do send ton after ton of foodstuffs to countries in need of assistance. They production of those foodstuffs is not accomplished by “lazy” or “greedy” people.

In many cases, people are kept alive by donated foodstuffs and the efforts of volunteers who distribute them.

All too often, though, those foodstuffs are diverted by corrupt politicians in the recipient countries for sale on the black market. The greed of those politicians is such that the sufferings and deaths of their own constituents are insignificant compared to their desire for money. How are the donors of foodstuffs “greedy” in such situations?

And in many cases, the distribution system in recipient countries is such that the foodstuffs remain at the point of receipt simply because no way exists to move them from that point. If we create a distribution system in such a country, we will also be required to fuel that system and to provide trained people for the operation of that system. Not to mention the creation of roadways, railways, airports, etc., etc. And all of this after we high-handedly interfere in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation. And we might well ask where the funding for these projects will arise.

It would make little difference if a cattleman converted his acreage to the production of grain if that grain could not be efficiently distributed or if it would be diverted by unscrupulous politicians.
And, just FYI, a lot of earth that is suitable for cattle raising would not grow grain if you watered it with your tears and sat up with it at night singing to it.

When you work out an equitable and efficient system for the world wide distribution of foodstuffs, as well as the source of financing for such a system, find yourself a forum and share your light with the rest of us. Until then, please spare us your simplistic moralizing.

sailor spurted out something along the lines of:

So I guess when my sister said she’d die if she didn’t get a new dress for her 16th birthday party, she wasn’t kidding, huh?

food isn’t a commodity, it’s a necessity. OK, so cavier and french champagne we ain’t talking about, but flour, some fruit and occasionally meat (not to mention water purifaction equipment, but that’s got nothing to do with farmers) won’t destroy the economy.

Unfortunately, in many of the lands where starvation is high, the ground has been either worked into dust, is a dessert, improperly farmed out of desperation, or there is a drought or other reason for not enough water to grow the crops.

(Some time back, the City of Los Angeles, I believe, needed water. Water was available in great quantities across a small mountain range. Farmers there had been using it for years. The city blasted through the mountains and created a viaduct for water - thoughtfully making it large enough for increased demands. They did not ask the farmers for permission. They gulped down a lot of water. In time, they gulped down so much that the farmers abandoned farming because their fields dried up. By then, politics had become involved and no one listened to the farmers.)

People need food. If people cannot get food, then they will make an effort to do so by any means possible. (Poaching in big game preserves, hunting endangered species, burning 1,000 acres a day oof virgin rainforest to plant vegetables, mining with mercury and cheap water jets which poison rivers and wreck the land. Stealing, robbing, killing, joining any rebellious political faction who will give them a pound of flour and a cup of rice.)

It is not simply that people do not know how to grow food, it is often because their land cannot. In China, because of the high cost of fertilizer, many of the crops are fertilized by human excrement. A real good way to spread disease but the people have to eat.

People living on a starvation diet, growing up that way will develop health problems in later times, not to mention that their brain development can be retarded. So when we get all pissed off at some foreign nation for not seeing the obvious and wondering why they seem so stupid, we never consider the possibility that a large chunk of the population has starvation encored brain damage.

There are political problems as well. America chose not to go and wipe out idiot dictators and crooked governments. (If we had not, Cuba and Mexico would be the 51st and 52d states by now.) It is known that we have shipped huge shipments of food to places, like Africa and Vietnam, only to have the government step in, thank us for the free goods, confiscate and sell most of it to enrich themselves and a little bit actually gets to the starving people.

If people are hungry, feed them. Not all of them are dead beat bums. We have close to 20 million starving Americans here, most of them kids, with parents trying to scratch out a living doing anything at sublevel income because no jobs are available in their area. Even in today’s booming market, not all can get jobs. I know a guy with a bum foot who wants to work and can work, if he is allowed to sit down now and then. He applied for over 200 jobs, including sitting behind a bullet proof shield in a gas station/store and never got one.

This form of economics does not just affect the food. You like paying $500 for a root canal when the dentist uses only $100 worth of stuff? Having a tooth pulled for $50, when he uses $5 worth of Novocain? Seeing your doctor for 30 minutes and getting a $75 bill for just talking to him? How about paying $200 for a $50 shot in the ER, plus getting charged $300 for using the room, and $150 for the doctor walking in for 10 minutes?

Economics. All want to have good pay to buy things with, as a result, the price of services goes up, along with the price of goods.

Technically, not only can we here in the States easily feed all of our people at less than 1/2 of what we pay now, but we could supply health care at rock bottom prices.

Economics does not allow it.

We can feed the world easily, but it is no longer economically viable to do so. I recall when a farmer had his trusty tractor, assorted attachments for it, some hands, trucks and a few pieces of machinery. The last time I checked out a farm, the guy had massive chunks of scary looking machinery painted bright green, yellow and red, air conditioned cabs with stereo, radio and sported a cell phone. The machinery did everything but package and ship the product!

I estimated that the man had about a million dollars worth of machinery. He also was paying twice as much for seed than he did years ago, had to pay increased fertilizer costs and increased insecticide costs because everyone bitched about harmful sprays. So he switched to a more ‘earth friendly’ spray, which does less, is cheaper to make, has to be applied more frequently and costs more. Plus, his fuel and power bills had to be enormous.

He has to keep aware of the crop estimates and government predictions or else that 500 acres of peas he planted at $100 an acre might not bring in the $250 per unit he needs, but only $75 because every other farmer planted peas and the price is down.

Jerking the price of gas around does not help him either, because he uses an enormous amount of fuel and power. He buys fuel in bulk. Naturally he does not want to farm like in the ‘days of old’ where farmers worked from dawn to dusk, had little time for pleasure, and grew old before their time or worked themselves to death. He wants enough of a profit to enjoy living.

Economics. Everything goes up.

We can feed the world easily, but there is no way to even pay the basic costs of doing so.

      • I would also point out, that in most everyplace with an “overpopulation/starvation” problem, two other things are usually available: guns, and at least one drug of choice. - MC

I’d rather pay $500 for a dentist doing a root canal than buying $100 of materials and doing it myself (or having my wife do it on me)! Don’t you think his time and training is worth something? I’d pay more for someone I thought was more skilled, also, especially if I needed complicated work done. Do you think his only cost in pulling a tooth is $5 of novacaine?

In an ER, you’re paying for the “convenience” of having immediate access to doctors and ER equipment. If I may be having a heart attack, and I need a shot of something to stabilize my heart, I’d rather pay $700 for the shot in an ER room, and have a 10 minute doctor visit, than $50 to get the shot in a clinic. If I’m just getting a flu shot, the clinic is fine- there’s not much chance that I’ll need immediate access to an operating table, so I don’t need to pay for that. I’m not saying that medical costs are rational, but hopefully you get what you pay for.

**

The price isn’t going up because of increasing demand- that just increases the supply (unless there’s a shortage, etc.) For example, dentists don’t charge $50 today (using your example above) for a tooth extraction instead of $10 (or whatever it used to be) in 1940 because the demand has increased, but because the cost (and inflation) has increased. But again, ideally, you get what you pay for- I’d rather have a $50 extraction with today’s technology than a $10 extraction with 1940’s technology.

**

Others have posted good, realistic posts about the food system, and why it’s the way it is. Sure, we could have health care at rock bottom prices- but with rock bottom service. How do you pay for multi-million dollar MRI and other imaging equipment? All the specialized tools needed for state-of-the-art surgery? Companies invest untold millions in R&D for this stuff- eventually it has to be paid for or there’s no incentive to make it.

An even better analogy is computer chips. It only takes a dollar or two of silicon to make a pentium chip, yet Intel charges hundreds of dollars each, because they need to make up their hundreds of millions spent designing it.

**

When was it? We may be able to produce enough food to feed the world easily, but as others have said (repeatedly), that’s just a small part of the problem. You have to package and transport it to the destination. You can’t really transport it to those in need without a modern infrastructure in place, and if they had that, they’d already have their own food.

A couple hundred years ago, people could starve within 50 miles of a farm, just because it was too hard to get the food out. Now, a supermarket within 90 seconds of my house will stock thousands of items from all over the continent, because of our incredible infrastructure of roads, planes, trains, etc. In many poor, starving countries, the infrastructure is not even as good as ours 200 years ago. Food gets delivered to a country, then sits in a city because it’s impossible to take it where it’s needed.

**

He doesn’t go back to the ‘days of old’ because he’d go out of business. All those machines let him grow crops for far cheaper than the ‘days of old’, otherwise he wouldn’t buy them. They don’t just save him a few hours every day- if they did, he could just hire someone to work those few hours a day. It’s because of those machines that we can produce so much food.

It’s because of our capitalist system that we even have the technology to make so much food and create our infrastructure in the US, not despite it.

Arjuna34

I think you missed my point. You may need one commodity more than another but that does not change the facts that it is a commodity and, as such, subject to market forces etc. My point is that we do not need to give those people charity because it accomplishes nothing but help them perpetuate a culture of misery. Better just teach them how to feed themselves if they care to learn. Everything else is a waste of time. As has been pointed out, some cultures are productive and some aren’t. We do not need to feed those that aren’t. We can only help them change and learn to be productive.

And, BTW, I did not spurt that. But if you send that sister of yours over maybe I could do some spurting for her and she’d like it.

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by sailor *
**

Spoken like a true sailor! :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

Arjuna34

Guys, let’s leave each other’s sisters out of this, Hmmm?

That said, this subject is best covered in Great Debates, where I’ll send the thread now.

Don’t forget what happens when we (or some other country) decides to ship a whole bunch of food to a poorer country. Not only does the despot de jour make sure access to the food is restricted to whomever he wants (not the starving masses), but you also have to take into account the economics of dumping.

How much is farmer Nubal’s corn crop worth if down at the docks they are just giving corn away? Do you think he can sell his year’s worth of effort? Not likely.

PRISM02 said:

Well, then, let them eat cake! :slight_smile: