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submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[-] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Feel free to educate me if I am wrong, but I vaguely remember reading somewhere that famine happens due to lack of logistics rather than lack of limited food in the world. I still think future is plant based for other reasons(emissions, cost, etc) but is the solution to famines producing more food or providing more logistics? Or maybe a combination of both?

[-] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

This sounds like a passage from Das Kapital where Marx talks about famine in India. What was true in 18** isn't necessarily true today, and I suspect that producers wanting to drive up prices is a bigger challenge than transport today

[-] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

Currently, with the industrial fossil-fuel food regime, food insecurity (up to famine) happens:

  • due to markets pricing out poor people (doesn't matter if there's food around if you can't buy it)
  • war - destroying food growing capacity, killing or scaring away the agriculture workers, stealing harvests, or just preventing harvest seasons
  • blockades, usually part of war, which is what you see in Gaza
  • local production failure due to various reasons like: weather catastrophes, drought, epidemics, floods, but also economic failures such as the fail to buy inputs by the time they're needed, such as not being able to buy fertilizers because they got much more expensive to import (because production decreased and/or demand increased such as subsidized demand from rich countries)

As the climate gets more chaotic, drought, weather disasters, diseases and pests are going to become major factors in this food security state. The other aspect are inputs, especially fertilizers, which depend on fossil fuels which are both running low (getting expensive) AND must be replaced with something that isn't destroying the planet's climate. This is called a predicament.

In any sane society, resources that are scarce would be rationed according to need. And that means using cropland and inputs for food for humans. This is both for dealing with food insecurity and for mitigating climate heating.

this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
575 points (96.4% liked)

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