Today's reading, named "The Scarcity Fallacy", talks about the current world hunger problems and includes some possible solutions. It first starts of by looking for the root of the problem. The author argues that failure to produce enough food to our increasing world population is not the problem. Indeed, food is more plentiful today than any other time in history. The real problem is ensuring access to this food and distributing it more equitably. This task is negatively affected by different factors such as poverty, health crises, political instability, social inequalities, conflicts and corruption and finally "the supermarket revolution". For example, the problem with our modern industrialized food system is that while it may increase food yields and ship food to more places more efficiently, the increased prices that often accompany such a system makes food less affordable for those in need. Oxfam International, for example, argues that the developped world should not dump cheap, subsidized food aid that undermines local food production and markets in the developing economies it tries to help. A better solution would be to provide money directly and promote local farming. This approach would transmit money directly to those in need, rather than making the global agri-businesses and shipping companies profit from the current system. Other solutions include making food a human right, improving the efficiency and corruption of food aid, and solving social issues such as ethnic and gender inequalities.
This text made me realize that solving world hunger is an extremely hard task to do. It is probably the reason why we still have this important issue in our modern world. The problem of hunger comes from so many different factors and ties in with so many other problems that it makes fixing it very challenging. For example, a big part of world hunger comes from political instabilities and conflicts. This makes our world hunger problem way bigger and difficult to solve since we are adding other problems on top of it. A vicious cycle can even be produced according to the author. More precisely, established poverty can contribute to further conflict and environmental destruction. This limits food access and reinforces a feedback cycle causing more conflict, which in turn creates more scarcity, and so on.
I'm happy to know that there are multiple organizations trying to make a difference about world hunger. Organizations such as ONE and Heifer International can make a big difference in someone's life. However, I believe that international policy makers, agri-businesses, people of power, will have to step up and help the best they can because they are the ones who can make the biggest difference.
Questions:
Can we ever end world hunger?
How can I make a difference as an individual?
Is it moral to grow corn for energy purposes when people are starving in other parts of the world?
Can you limit the corporations' influence in poor countries while keeping our lifestyle.
To be perfectly honest, I don't think we will ever end world hunger. We can barely solve a single miniscule problem as a country, how can we solve such a huge problem as world hunger. We are one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and yet, as we learned in class, we too have an extraordinary number of people who go hungry.
ReplyDeleteAs an individual, I guess for the time being, the best thing to do is work at soup kitchens, food pantries, and 'midnight runs'. Just because you can't solve the whole world's problem, doesn't mean you can't alleviate the pain of a few individuals.
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