Comment on That's how the world works.
azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 11 hours agoBoth your examples are pre Haber-Bosch. Not that it entirely invalidates your point, but daily calorie consumption for a Westerner is orders of magnitude cheaper than it was for a Victorian coal miner. In fact what we generally struggle with nowadays in rich countries is an overabundance of (poor quality) food.
It’s not out of the question for poor people to lack calories in rich countries, but that’s a monumental policy failure. And critically it happens to socioeconomic classes that have neither the time nor the land area to dedicate to things like doomsday prepping (i.e. poor and marginalized communities in urban areas). The only solution to food insecurity is social programs, not doomsday prepping or grain hoarding.
dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 hours ago
there was still storage of foods in both cases and both the Great Famine and Late Victorian Holocausts were cases where markets and false austerity led to normal food distribution systems during times of famine not happening, and then lots of deaths occurring
my point is that food production is a separate concern from food distribution - they’re related, and to your point over-production can reduce prices and make distribution more accessible, but when production occasionally fails, it is the economic system that starves people first (not the lack of food)
this is different than in pre-capitalist societies when usually during times when food production failed, stocks of food were released and distribution was ensured in ways that marketized & capitalist societies have not done (where for example in Syria around the time of the Arab Spring, we saw grocers dying from starvation because they couldn’t make enough money selling food to afford to buy food for themselves).
And yes, starvation when food is abundant is a monumental policy failure - this is something we should be driving home more to people, that the US chooses to have starving and homeless people as a policy choice.
Completely agreed that social solutions are the only way to solve food insecurity, individual action like doomsday prepping is a distraction that primes us to victim-blame people who die for not “preparing” adequately.