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.