Some Knowledge

There are a lot of people in the world.  Many of these people can not afford food.  Some 50,000 people die each day from malnutrition.  30,000 of these people are children.  The situation is deplorable.  What can be done to feed all these humans?

There is at this time no shortage of food in the world.  Farmers produce a surplus every year.  What is in short supply is money for the poor.  It is a financial problem that causes people to starve to death.  It’s not that food is not available, it’s that people can not afford to buy this food.  The price of food has been going up recently.  This means that more people will not be able to afford this food.

There is only a limited amount of money available to people.  This is because there are only so many jobs.  A job does not create money.  A job apportions money from one person to another.  The fact is that there are a lot of rich people and corporations.  These people make money by selling stuff to workers.  The workers make their money by working for some factory or other operation.  It is a closed loop.  If you want money, you have to get in the loop.  This is where the system fails.  There are not enough jobs for all the people.  Some people are unemployed and can not afford to buy necessary things.

So, what can be done to end this mess?  If governments were responsible they would create work programs for people to earn money.  Governments print the money, so there should be no shortage.  In a worst case scenario, governments could even give away money to the poor.  This already happens in the welfare system.  The government isn’t losing anything but a bit of inflation on the value of their currency.  The alternative is that more people will die.

The world is basically run on a free market economy.  This means that the corporations rule the earth.  If you have money you control things, like commodities and companies and other resources.  The problem with this system is greed.  People are naturally inclined to amass large fortunes.  One person having a thousand times as much money as the average person means that a thousand average persons have nothing.  It is a simple equation.

Perhaps the solution is to supply free food.  Free food cuts into the profitability of local farmers, who then can not produce food to feed local people.  Still, if all food were free, it would solve the problem of starvation.  We do not live in a world where you can just go off into the forest and spear a deer.  We live in a world that has concentrated populations.  If you lose your job, you might die of hunger.  Maybe what is needed is a program that guarantees jobs to everyone.  It’s just an idea.

It’s disgraceful for children to be starving to death while corporations turn perfectly good corn into motor fuel.  There has to be a solution to this problem.  Perhaps the governments of the world could forget their paranoid militaries and spend that money on coming up with a plan to feed the hungry.  Even in the united states there are many homeless people who have no food.  Instead of relying on the darwinian forces of the free market economy to solve problems they have no incentive to solve, we should tell our governments to find a solution to the problems of poverty and hunger.  It makes no sense that so many people should have to die while there is so much food in the world to feed them, if they only had money.