[988747]

And yet a billion people in this world are starving... Cutting back on industrial agriculture means participating in a genocide, basically.

Some geeks here are coming up with sci-fi ideas of producing food in vertical farms, or underwater, why don't we start by simply using existing techniques?

[knutzui]

This is incorrect. If all food we produce world wide was distributed equally everywhere not a single person would starve. However it isn't distributed anywhere close to equally. In many societies food is instead wasted in large amounts.

Cutting back on industrial agriculture is sorely needed from an environmental standpoint, as well as reducing food waste. Solving starvation requires different solutions, such as improved distribution, as well as political stability.

[runsWphotons]

Distribution is hard, though. Will reducing food even in countries where it is wasted solve distribution any better, or will it just hurt the people at the bottom of the distribution chain more?

[hef19898]

Global food production is a, and I oversimplify a lot here, more of a distribution problem than it is a capacity problem. Certain countries cutting back on theor surplus has zero impact on the starving regions of the world, because as things stand now those surpluses aren't exported there anyway.

Quite the opposite, exporting said surplus, besides accute deliveries to mitigate famine, can kill local farming. There is no way small, just a bit above subsistance farming can compete with the surplus of industrial farming in, e.g., Europe. Take chicken for example, in Europe we prefer chicken breasts and legs, the wings are a far, far third place. As a result, a lot ofbthe chicken left overs, legs, wings and so in, didn't have a market in Europe. It got expoeted to Africa, with a purchasing price of close to nothing since the meat sold in Europe already covered costs, overhead and profits. With shipping being close to nothing per chicken wing, the imported food was way cheaper than locally produced food, driving a bunch of local farmers out of busimess and into poverty. And reducing local food production, increasing the risk of local famine while increasing dependency on global food markets (not really a good thing neither....).

Same principle applies for donated clothes, only now local tailors, often women, are affected.

So no, cutting back on industrial over production is by no means taking part in genocide (!) (you couldn't aim lower than that, could you?).

[runsWphotons]

But wouldnt it lower the price of chicken in those places, providing more people w access to good calories although hurting the local farmers? Couldnt this be solved by a country putting up tariffs or banning importing such chicken? If they didn't do that what was their reason?

[hef19898]

Why didn't they put tariffs in place? Well, how many governments, and people in power, did you ever hear of that worried about the poor and common folks? There are a lot of people profitting from these things, including the social conciousness of us in the developed world. And those interests, combined with a ton of money and close to no oversight, result in a system that just doesn't care about what happens to the average people.