Ending hunger by 2030 would cost just $93 billion a year — less than one per cent of the $21.9 trillion spent on military budgets over the past decade, according to the UN World Food Programme (WFP).
But how can apes establish dominance over other apes without proper funding?
Divided and conquered
Capitalism kills.
Yep. Non-capitalist countries are famous for not having militaries.
Tbf there is a giant boogeyman-like entity out there threathening to invade them and spread capitalist freedom in return for natural resources like oil and outsourced workers.
And boogeyman’s military is so huge 5% of the upkeep could end world hunger.
Solving world hunger isn’t a money problem, it’s a corruption problem, especially outside of 1st world countries.
For every dollar moved out of the military to “solve world hunger” i bet less than 10 cents would actually make it to food someone can eat, and the total always referenced as this much would solve it.
In which case, it’s not 1%, it’d be more like 10%.
I don’t think these numbers quite add up. It says $93B a year, vs $21.9T over a decade. So that’s $2.19 per year, or a a bit over 20 times as much. So fixing hunger costs slightly less than 5% of the world’s military budget.
Still a more worthy way to spend that money, but let’s get the numbers correct.
Yeah but without world hunger there’d be less justification for military spending. Lockheed needs its milkies, mommy
Mmmmmmmommy milkers numnumnum
-Lockheed Martin, lobbying Congress to build the more expensive but technically less capable F35, probably
The global military spending is increasing every year, so it wasn’t $2.19T every year. In 2024 it was $2.7T. $93B amounts to about 3.4% of that. Not perfect, but fairly close.
But the ROI for ending hunger can’t possibly match military spending, plus military spending provides governments with a clear path to choosing economic winners, so here we are.
Um excuse me, these fighter jets aren’t going to bomb children by themselves, we need all the money we can get.
if you give poor people a meal, they’ll have the audacity to ask for another one just a few hours later! The nerve! /s
*Less than 10%
You can’t say it costs X per year but then use a decade for the other number.
UN says (I’m paraphrasing because they are pussies) we don’t need any jobs apart from activist and policymaker until the world is in peace.
We already have surplus in everything and logistics isn’t even a problem because amazon proved that you can ship anywhere within one day if you are willing.
The only problem remaining is the law.
Until these are fixed, you are mentally masturbating when you say “my department is actually still finding out new stuff”. Dude the pipe is clogged and the engine is waterlogged, who cares you pump in new stuff?
ps: I’m one of these mental masturbators so no shade.
Amazon can ship anywhere within a day because use subcontractors and are working barely legally or straight up illegally in an effort to kill off all local logistics services.
It’s a rather big problem in Europe, and was a large point of discussion at the ETF Workshop this year.
Slightly philosophical question, but what does “ending world hunger” mean? Spending 1% of military budget to feed everyone once? Hiring lifelong farmers to build out fields and grow food? Would not food security lead to higher birth rates, which would eventually lead to higher food requirements, when sometimes it already feels somewhat unsustainable? I’m just confused at the meaning behind “ending world hunger”
what does “ending world hunger” mean?
Distributing agricultural surplus at market rate relative to population demand rather than market demand.
Would not food security lead to higher birth rates
Firstly, no.
The higher the degree of education and GDP per capita of a human population, subpopulation or social stratum, the fewer children are born in any developed country.[
Pulling people out of starvation tends to reduce family sizes, as people don’t plan their families with the expectation of high levels of child mortality.
Secondly, “you need to starve to death because we’re afraid you might live long enough to have kids” is a fucked public policy on the scale of Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Finally,
lead to higher food requirements, when sometimes it already feels somewhat unsustainable?
Sustainability is a consequence of land use policy, not population rate. India and China are the classic case studies of this in practice. But you can see the pattern repeated across the planet.
Vegetarian agriculture is significantly less taxing on the ecology than animal agriculture. When you compare arable land requirements per Ethiopia, Bangledish, or Thailand residents to the dietary demands of Americans, Israelis, or Argentinians, what you discover is the enormous toll animal farming takes.
The unsustainable clear cutting of jungle and near-malicious misuse of limited irrigation drives up costs and cripples availability in even the wealthiest (and most thinly populated) nations on Earth.
Meanwhile, significantly more populace regions can thrive on a primarily vegetarian diet.
Secondly, “you need to starve to death because we’re afraid you might live long enough to have kids” is a fucked public policy on the scale of Israeli genocide in Gaza.
I feel the need to defend myself and say that this was not my thinking process. My perspective was purely based on places like China and India. I doubt many are actually starving, but would not you say that the population itself is a bit too much for the region and long term sustainability? Maybe I’m indeed wrong and this is not a problem
My perspective was purely based on places like China and India.
During the famine of the 1960s, China’s population numbered around 400M and it was the poster child for “overpopulation”.
Sixty years later, they’ve functionally eliminated food insecurity. Nobody in China goes hungry because the shelves are bare. Their population now stands at 1.3B.
Maybe I’m indeed wrong and this is not a problem
Industrial agriculture has dramatically increased the agricultural productivity of post-WW2 China and India in the same way it transformed Europe and the US half a century earlier. Modern fertilizers, irrigation techniques, and ecological protective measures combined with industrial era logistics and transportation have ended the threat of famine at the national level… at least for the time being (squints at the impacts of climate change).
What famines we see in the modern era are fully the consequence of human policy. They’re either collateral damage - wars in Ukraine and Sudan and the Congo that disrupt agricultural and human traffic - or a deliberate consequence of imperial foreign policy - the '91 famine in North Korea, the famine in Iraq following Operation Desert Storm, the blockade of Cuba, the segregation of Hispaniola into Haiti and Dominican Republic, the genocide in Gaza.
What the article illustrates is the relative ease by which these huge (sometimes deliberate) logistical failures of food trade could be solved with a tiny appropriation of the military budgets that (sometimes deliberately) create them.
Yeah, all good points. I guess it really comes down to selfishness
It says 96b, less than 1% of military spending over the last decade, which imo is a misleading way of framing things. It would then be approximately 10% of average annual military expenditure over the last decade.
Looks like a larger slice of the military spending pie so looks less like news. But it’s what it is.
Also lifting regions out of nutritional poverty has knock on effects on development, education and general economic participation. It’s an absolute win all around. Even for shareholders as market size and productive, sustainable and educated labour pool grows.
The rest of the military budget should be used for education, infrastructure and environmental protection. They are all absolute wins.
That’s a good question, followed by a lot of bad assumptions.
Excuse me for being skeptical, but I’ve been hearing about ending world hunger for 3 decades now, and if it’s as easy as moving only 1% of the military budget, then… I just feel like there’s more to this than media tells us on the surface level
so your are suspicious the military industrial complex is not willing to part with billions to gift away?
yeah, that sure is evidence they do not think ending world hunger is not feasible and not evidence of greed and corruption, no sir
1%
That’s billions already
The challenge here is that it takes more than money to solve world hunger.
You also need some way to prevent the greedy from hoarding food and using it as a weapon to subjugate others, keeping them hungry.
As usual, the problem isn’t lack of food or lack of money, it’s greedy people not wanting to share.
Well you’d think they would include that in the calculation.
Remembering when the Live Aid food was left to rot.
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1985/07/13/Food-rotting-in-Ethiopia-report-says/7042490075200/
Or, like, US aid just this year
Or, like, humanitarian aid headed to Gaza right now.
As usual, the problem isn’t lack of food or lack of money, it’s greedy people not wanting to share.
At this point, it’s white nationalists who want people to die. From Gaza to Haiti to Afghanistan, engineered famines are a tool of the powerful to subjugate and exterminate their geopolitical rivals.
This has been the problem since time immemorial. If you have a solution, you are a better person than I.
What if we sent so much food that the hoarders couldn’t hoard it all? Just a metric assload of food. Eventually food is so cheap and plentiful the hoarders give up.
You flood their market with cheap food and you put all their domestic farmers out of business.
Dumping charity on developing countries rarely works. You need to help them invest in their economy. This was shown with that micro loans paper (which won a Nobel prize).
Yup. Goods aid is only a very short-term measure. Vaccines for example expire if not stored correctly and used promptly.
Service aid is more effective medium-term, such as when the BBC World Service ran their health advisory bulletins during the W African Ebola outbreak.
Investment aid is the long-term solution, with the goal of a sustainable uplift in living standards, such as aid money being spent on the Indian space programme which allows satellites to monitor landslides and direct assistance safely.
Food should never have been a buisness in the first place.
Also areas that are struggling with food shortage and famine don’t really have for profit farmers. You’ll find that the majority are subsistence farming and maybe sell a little bit of excess. The exception would be those in these places that own a ton of land and have the money to farm at scale. Remaining food needs typically come from wealthier nations producing excess food at scale.
Ideally the state should produce staple crops at scale. Keep the people fed. This frees up subsistence farmers to engage in other economic sectors or employs them through the state to produce food. Either way it’s more reliable and more people get to eat. For the for profit farmers they could simply focus crops that aren’t staples.
If farming is not allowed to be a business then everyone has to be a subsistence farmer, by definition. Farming being a business simply means a farmer produces excess food and exchanges it for other things they need (using money is a medium of exchange).
The state producing crops means the state is now in the business of farming. That doesn’t free it from all of the decision-making that farmers have to do, it merely centralizes those decisions. In particular, farming requires you to decide which crops to grow on what land during what years. Make a mistake and the whole crop fails. By centralizing farming decisions you make it more likely to have a catastrophic crop failure country-wide.
You’re forgetting (or don’t know in the first place) that agricultural land isn’t fungible the way money is. Land is different everywhere: soil conditions, rain, rivers, sun, wind, climate, seasons. This is why farmers in the Midwest don’t start growing almonds to undercut California almond growers despite having access to vastly more water reserves (via the Great Lakes) than California.
Most people new to farming fail at it. They don’t have the experience and knowledge necessary to farm their own land effectively. This is experience which is built up and passed down through families over many generations. It can’t be brought in externally because the plots of land for a given farm are essentially unique to that farm (a unique combination of the many factors listed above).
This is also why, for example, the Soviet Union experienced such terrible famines when it got into the business of farming. Taking over farms destroys that experience and centralized planners cannot effectively regain it.
States are frankly terrible at preserving experience as institutional knowledge and passing it on to the next generation. Large corporations are guilty of this too, except they have a strong profit motivation so they find ways to preserve the knowledge they need to maintain profitability. Those corporations still end up becoming really bad at a lot of other things that aren’t critical to profitability, which is why a corporations products can become worse over time. Often it’s not a case of greed at all but simply somebody retired and nobody knows how a particular machine works and it breaks down so they replace it with a new machine that doesn’t produce as high of a quality part.
Anyway, states don’t have a profit motive so they have no incentive whatsoever to preserve knowledge except what’s necessary to remain in power. This is best evidenced by the Putin regime and its complete ineptitude at both fighting a war in Ukraine and growing its economy beyond oil & gas. Putin is a master at the political machinations necessary to remain in power but utterly hopeless at essentially everything else.
Anyway, TLDR: most farms fail. Capitalism is good at picking the farms that don’t fail. Centralized states are horrible at just about everything. Centralizing planning for farming would be a disaster (and has been every time it was tried).
If farming is not allowed to be a business then everyone has to be a subsistence farmer, by definition.
If you read my comment you’d not be saying this.
Clearly I mean food production shouldn’t be only for profit. We should produce enough food as a service.
Frankly you are using the most obtuse way to define buisness. While I’m sure it’s technically correct, it’s not the only way that term is used and you’ve basically made an argument over something that clearly wasn’t the point.
You’re forgetting (or don’t know in the first place)
No it’s purely irrelevant. I didn’t see the need to specify you need to grow crops suitable to land/region. This point is so bad I’m starting to believe you asked AI to make an argument for you.
By centralizing farming decisions you make it more likely to have a catastrophic crop failure country-wide.
Not if you listen to experts. Kinda funny how you believe that corporations can grow crops no issue, but the state can’t. Corporations already produce most of the global food supply.
Most people new to farming fail at it
Not if you listen to experts
This is also why, for example, the Soviet Union experienced such terrible famines
Because they didn’t listen to experts. Also did you already forget we were talking about regions already under famine conditions?
Large corporations are guilty of this too, except they have a strong profit motivation so they find ways to preserve the knowledge they need to maintain profitability
So it’s totally possible for the state to do it too. Corporations prioritize profit that’s why we burn crops to keep prices stable.
Anyway, states don’t have a profit motive so they have no incentive whatsoever to preserve knowledge
You came to an inherently untrue conclusion. The state can be motived just to take care of its citizens. That’s what we should aim for.
So basically you made an argument that is overall unrelated, relies on the assumption the state must always fail, and that corporations are good. I’m unconvinced to say the least
The hoarders have guns. They will take it all, and they will be able to recruit more with the promise of that food.
Maybe the solution is more peacekeeping forces to ensure the food output from the local farmers isn’t stolen, destroyed or hoarded.
If he wanted to, Elon Musk could personally fund this five times over and still have a few billion left.
Didn’t he brag a while ago he’d do it if someone came up with a plan and then WHO (or UN or whoever) did and Elmo suprisingly didn’t do anything?
You’re misremembering, or lying.
Musk replied to a claim by the UN that 2% of his wealth ($6 billion, at the time) could “solve world hunger”, calling their bluff by saying that if they showed him how that was possible with a detailed, transparent plan, he’d give them the money immediately.
The response Musk got was a massive backpedal, a plan that described helping world hunger, not ending/“solving” it, and only for one year.
Bluff was successfully called.
Musk responded on Twitter, writing, “If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it.”
As in “if you can provide a perfect solution to a very complex global problem in 140 characters or less then I’ll see what’ I can find in my couch”. I can make that promise too, difference being that no one will try to defend me for being pedantic and just think that I’m an idiot.
Thinking about this tho…he’d probably do it. He’s a narcissist, it would boost his ego immensely and give him even more of a platform to stand on and pretend he’s good and funny internet guy
There’s a line of people who would do that if someone could craft a fool-proof plan to end world hunger. That’s big enough ego boost for many, problem is just that there is no such solution which would need just a boatload of money to complete. World Food Program gave him a reasonable proposal which would’ve made an absolutely life changing difference for millions of people but that wasn’t good enough for him.
YUP.
Did you miss the words “a year”?
Did you miss “by 2030”?
No, I just know it’s ridiculous to think food is something that magically stops costing money after a time, especially a time as short as 4 years.
Then maybe you should read the article because it does not make your straan claim at all.
That’s really not how most organisations go about solving the problem. They aid by creating and developing agricultural infrastructure, not just buying people food.
God doesn’ t want us to feed people, he wants armageddon.
Sieg Heil!
Oh, wait. No, that was the other guy. I get them mixed up a lot, cause they are both such twats.
That explains a lot with the revelations book.
Revelations is a revenge fantasy of an oppressed minority (Roman age Christians) aimed at the occupying imperial army (Rome).
It can be summarized as “When Rome fails, the world will end and everyone will get what they deserve”.
Meanwhile, there’s an extensive prior catalog of religious texts in the New Testament that absolutely do tell you to share the wealth, care for your neighbors, and pursue a utopian paradise free from inequality in God’s name.
Why is an annual figure being directly compared to an “over the past decade” figure?
You missed the “by 2030” part, indicating that what’s being compared to the decade of military spending is the overall, not yearly, cost.
Food continues to be a need more than 4 years from now. That’s not an “end”.
Did you read anything but the title? The investment mentioned would guarantee thay nobodu starves from 2030 onwards. Food for everyone would become the new normal. We already produce more food than humanity needs, we just waste a huge amount of it. Moving production around and creating new transporrt routes are not ongoing costs.
