Just 4% of the bailout could end world hunger

This isnt a suprise at all to me. It would be so easy to end the hunger. Yet they would rather spend money on war.

reply to post by Hellish-D


If we ended world hunger and all those that would have died survived.. we would need an additional .. 8% .. then 16% then 32% of the bailout to keep up with the reproducing starving people.

Hunger and starvation are natural ways for the planet to keep populations in line. If the population exceeds the bounty of the land, they die off.

reply to post by Hellish-D


A shortage of actual food has never been the problem. Plenty of food exists. The problem is distribution. Those Peoples who are starving are doing so because their Governments or those controlling them want them to starve.

Unfortunately those who are keeping food from their people are either in countries in a state of Anarchy or under the rule of Dictators and often those keeping the food from them are active in the UN. Ever took a look at the membership of the UN's Human Rights Council?

Farmers are perfectly capable of growing as much as the World needs. Do you have the answer how to get it to the people? Short of the West occupying these areas, I don't think there is an answer.

The West is told to butt out of other countries affairs. Part of doing that is sitting back and watching their citizens starve, because you can't have it both ways.

I've often thought it incredible the number of people who do want it both ways.

reply to post by Rockpuck


Only a tiny portion of the Earths land is populated. We need to get a handle on population growth by bringing the Third World out of their self-imposed Dark Ages, but the Earth can sustain the number here now.

If modern Farming techniques were in use around the world, food would be dirt cheap and plentiful. Human suffering through starvation IS NOT necessary. Free Societies with good leadership is.

A life of a starving child in the Sudan or the Congo has the exact same value as the life of anyone else on the Planet. If it does not, we are headed for a world not worth living in anyway. The one envisioned by Hitler and other such Monsters.

Originally posted by Jess_Undefined
This isnt a suprise at all to me. It would be so easy to end the hunger. Yet they would rather spend money on war.

Easy to end hunger??????????????

OK. What is the plan? Start with North Korea. How do you get food past the Dictator and his Military who get all of the food and to the People easily?

Now the Congo, in a state of chaos for decades. How do you get food to the people there without it being taken by the Bad Guys?

You can not do these things. Farmers would have no problem growing to much food. How do you get it to the people without occupying these areas and taking them over?

You don't want War and yet the only way to get food to many areas would be to take over their governments or in some cases create a government for them. You can not have it both ways. You can not out of one side of your mouth say no more War and then demand we get food to the people held hostage by evil governments or anarchists.

Money has nothing to do with it. That is the lie told by the evil people who are keeping the food from their people in the first place. When is the last time you saw a Dictator with a distended belly, dying of starvation? Send them shipments of food for their people and see how fast they sell it and put the money in their pockets. Of course they will be right back the next day on the floor of the UN claiming it was not enough, looking to make more money for themselves while their people starve.

They rely on naive people to keep the scam going and of course their are plenty of naive people to go around.

[edit on 2/15/2009 by Blaine91555]

[edit on 2/15/2009 by Blaine91555]

When the Kennedy administration was looking for a way to prove American superiority over the Soviets, one of the ideas that was shelved in favor of going to the moon instead was a massive irrigation development project for impovrished nations. We could have done it in the 60s.

The only thing seriously holding us back is a lack of vision. If anyone had figured out a way to profit more from doing it than from not doing it, it would already be done. If you didn't know any better, you'd think it must be very hard to make money by supplying a product that every man woman and child on this planet absolutely MUST have on a regular basis.


Scarcity of resources and scarcity of labor are the only fundamental barriers to unlimited production and thus unlimited wealth. In most cases, scarcity of resources stems not from inavailability, but from failure to harvest them, which boils down to a labor shortage. If we could get more people building wind turbines, solar pannels, geothermal plants, etc we wouldn't have an energy crisis.

This labor shortage is not a true supply problem though. Potential workers are going untapped. Some are unemployed, others are engaged in subsistence activities which have no net and in some cases no gross product (at least in any useful form), such as prostitution, subsistence farming, and mercinary military service (as in Afghanistan before the arrival of US forces joining a militia was the most available mode of employment), just to name a few.

Ultimately it's a demand problem. Demand for labor in the places where untapped labor is most concentrated is severely depressed by the sizable up-front investments required to set up shop there. For example you can't build a wind farm in Somalia until there is relative peace, and peace generally does not happen when you have a lot of unemployed young men and not enough wealth to go around between them.

In short, opportunity costs keep us from developing the untapped labor resources that could help us fix other problems. We can't devote enough to that without missing out on other things. This is an efficiency problem. If it took less to get everything done, we could do it all.


The solution therefore is to take whatever money we can afford to throw at the problem and use it to increase efficiency of production in relevant areas of production in the most cost-efficient ways possible.

Food is one of those. If we invest in the means to produce more food with fewer workers and fewer other resources, and follow similar programs with resources other than food that are necessary to stability and prospertity, then for the same dollar amount we have more to offer in trade. This drives down the opportunity cost of stabilizing places like Somalia, as enough resources to tempt everyone to put down their guns and accept a job are being produced at a lower cost in dollars, labor, and resources, and gives us access to more labor and more material.


Long story short, if America would stop thinking in terms of the next fiscal quarter and start thinking in terms of the next quarter of a millenium, it would be investing in solutions to problems like world hunger. The cost of solving such underlying problems is small compared to the cost of treating the symptoms. We could invest 30 billion a year into such projects for the next 30 years, and it would cost us less than a trillion dollars. That means that if it kept us out of even one war like Iraq, we would be winning on the deal.

In the immortal words of Mark Twain, "Imagine you were an idiot. Now imagine that you were a member of congress. But I repeat myself." (or something like that)

You will never end hunger.
It has been pointed out that for so long as people continue to reproduce, they will stay ahead of any such relief.

Oh, so the Earth has plenty of unpopulated land.
Do you think it should be filled up with people?

In all this type of discussion everyone talks about food but no one ever talks about the problem of disposing of all the resultan feces.

Why is it that you consistently turn a blind eye to this very real problem.

You do know don't you, that we in this "civilized" world do not have an efficient method of sewage disposal ourselves?

Why do you suppose ALL our waterways are contaminated?
Why do you suppose that ocean life is dieing?
Right here where I live, sewer plants are running their overflow into the Gulf.
There are huge dead spots out there off the West Coast of Florida.
There is a huge dead spot extending South from the mouth of the Mississippie River.
Don't you think we should fix this before we go feeding 3rd world countries so that the can add more mouths to feed and butts to exit the result of eating?

I also wonder why exactly do we the "Western World" think that we should bring the 3rd world up to "our standards".
Why can't we recognize that their primitive life style is exactly where they should be?
Is it so hard to see that all our efforts in that direction have led to disaster for those people?

reply to post by cnichols



They don't want you independent. Where is their control if the people don't need them?

What they're offering is an addiction... so that you need the government so much you can't get off the crack even if it would mean a better life.

That's the plan.

World hunger will never, ever be ended. Every single effort to reduce world hunger, each and every time has created more hunger.

Ethiopia, Somalia, you name a place with hungry, starving people, and I'll show you a place that is vastly overpopulated.

When one sends food, one not only postpones the inevitable, but in fact, magnifies the problem.

More food from outside sources enables these overpopulated areas to breed more, which leads to greater suffering.

Then at the first interruption of the food supply, mass misery.

To interfere is to create more total suffering.

reply to post by OhZone


Am I to understand that your model for sustainable living considers starvation to be a superior alternative to family planning and conservation?

That seems to be something of a modest proposal to me. You are familiar with Swift's Modest Proposal aren't you? Solving the expensive problem of hungry orphans at a profit by turning hungry orphans into food? The only difference seems to be that you'd have us leave their corpses to rot rather than put them to good use in a stew. So for its inefficiencies your view isn't even Machiavellian- it's just evil.

If we try to do it the right way and we fail, the human population crashes, thus saving the Earth from us in exactly the manner you seem to suggest, with no harm done except for a little wasted money (as if that will matter when the human population is crashing).

If we do it the right way and we succeed, the human population stabilizes and remains supportable for the planet, no harm done at all.


Your idea only makes sense when you're not holding the short straw, but as you yourself mentioned on the environmental point, we all end up holding the short straw eventually. "The First World" starves the "Third World" and they do what they can to survive, including burning the rain forests for farmland. We enjoy our excess no matter how much damage we have to do to get it. And sooner or later, our land won't support us either and there will be no one to help, and you and me are the ones starving to death. There is not really any choice but to try and fix world hunger and other such problems in sustainable ways.

We've gotta build a lot of stuff right now anyway i we plan to survive, so we may as well engineer it to support all of us, and do something ethical to put a cap on how many of us there are.

I enjoy a moment of cynicism as much as the next guy but really...

[edit on Sun Feb 15 2009 by The Vagabond]

It's always been about power and control. Nothing more, nothing less.

I think all developed countries should help the undeveloped countries with any means possible. Europeans and the usa have exploited many countries in the past and should be helping the most!

While we have a guilty past, the fact that most african countries are plagued with dictatorships and/or otherwise super corrupt governments, certainly does'nt help the situation one bit.

People need access to clean running water, ample food, shelter and clothing. Pretty much what we need as well....

Basic education, which incorporates birth control should be mandatory.

Also, no tribal warfare!

Originally posted by Hellish-D
I think it's time to put things in perspective....

4% of the bailout would end world hunger

World hunger seems like one of those grand unsolvable problems – the perennial favorite wish of beauty pageant queens. The truth is, it’s not unsolvable at all.

The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) stated that it would only take $30 billion a year to launch the necessary agricultural programs to completely solve global food insecurity. (Severe hunger afflicts 862 million people annually.)

It also has other statistics. It makes you wonder what our priorities are, doesn't it?

[edit on 14-2-2009 by Hellish-D]

Wow finally a conspiracy that makes sense and has proof.

reply to post by Hellish-D


sounds like a marvelous idea. i know it does, the truth is most 3rd world countries have more than enough land to grow their own crops but the head coorperations own most of their land because it was so cheap to buy. once they own the land the profits no longer go to the country, it goes to a few people at the top and thats what creates this massively mistook problem. truth is to borrow $30billion would only hurt these countries as every bit of money borrowed to cure the starvation and glorified slavery would only result in more debt because the money they borrowed would have to be paid back with interest and if all the money they have has already gone to pay the debts they owed then where would the money come from to pay for that loan, it wouldn't be good to allow this to happen, the only way to cure world hunger is to take drastic steps to overthrow the heads of all the central banks and coorporations and put control of the money supply back into the hands of its people, not in the hands of the self-elected emporers of the world, the massichists and sadists that are the owners of the big banks, if you want to see a free world, a world away from poverty, you have to say goodbye to money, we are evolved and intelligent beings, why do we have to barter, the world is my community, not one small part, together we can overcome all the problems put before us, WATCH ZEITGEIST!!

reply to post by Hellish-D

unfortunatley if you gave somewhere like zimbabwe millions of dollars for food administration where do you think the money would end up. certainly not on the plates of the poor. would mugabe let the un in to start planting fields ?

another point is that as long as the west has the 3rd world over a barrel of debt nothing will change . you owe us millions of dollars in loans so well take your natural resources at a cheap rate . until the goverments and not buisness empires start taking a serious interest in the health of the whole world nothing will change. people of the world have the voice to change this on the net!
imagine the child below is your child or your neighbours child

reply to post by da pickles


sorry the link didnt work , this should
www.youtube.com...

I'm guessing that $30 Billion figure doesn't include the cost of the wars we'd have to fight to eliminate the roadblocks various warlords, dictators, government embargos, etc have placed between the food already available to feed the hungry and their stomaches. Let's face a fact here, there's a very large amount of food aid right now decomposing in warehouses and silos in Africa simply because that food is used as a major weapon in their civil and regional wars. How many billions would it take to eliminate all of these roadblocks and how many of the anti-war crowd would have the testicular fortitude to acknowledge the justifiabillity of those wars?

reply to post by burdman30ott6

you hit the nail on the head .education is needed as well as aid but how can you teach a starving man

Originally posted by burdman30ott6
I'm guessing that $30 Billion figure doesn't include the cost of the wars we'd have to fight to eliminate the roadblocks various warlords, dictators, government embargos, etc...

Amatuers study tactics. Professionals study logistics. Virtually no one in Africa has the resources to exert broad or lasting military influence without at least tacit approval from a major outside power. The obstacles we're talking about are being presented by glorified street gangs.

They can only do what they do because they have access to the international arms market. They only have access to the international arms market because all five permanent members of the UN Security Council agree to leave that market intact and unchecked, since they all occasionally find it useful for exerting subtle influence.

Any one of the 5 permanent members of the UNSC could use its economic and diplomatic clout to drag the others, and thus the rest of the UN, kicking and screaming into a coherent arms policy and completely bypass the need for significant military interventions as part of a solution for Africa. We're just not interested for some reason.

reply to post by The Vagabond



We're not interested because our arms manufacturers are a major part of the US economy. If we stop producing weapons for African warlords, our country's economy will suffer.

Basically, we'll let other people die so that we might enjoy McDonalds, iPods and gas-guzzling cars.