[bpodgursky]

A few decades ago, mass famine was still a thing, and all it took to keep people alive was food aid. Ex, the famine in Ethiopia which killed a million+: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983%E2%80%931985_famine_in_Et...

Food insecurity is still a thing, but the only mass starvation is driven by conflict in hard-to-reach places like Yemen, where you can't just easily ship food and save a million lives.

Now, the most effective aid interventions are campaigns like de-worming and Malaria; but those are more of a QALY calculation, where you de-worm 100 kids to prevent serious disease in some subset of them. Which overall drives the cost up, but is actually a good trend.