It seems odd to contrast the two since there's no direct relation.
Hunger/famine is generally caused by regional problems for example poor infrastructure or security. If lack of infrastructure doesn't allow the movement of goods (e.g. food/aid) or water, it doesn't matter how much "excess" food there is elsewhere you cannot get it to where it is needed, and ditto with moving supplies into areas safely.
If you want to combat hunger, build more roads, water pipes, and improve regional security. Pointing out that there's a spare/excess $1 bag of corn on the opposite side of the world isn't constructive, because it would cost $100 to get that $1 bag of corn to where hunger is (e.g. sea, train, then air drop, and that ignores corruption/spoilage).
Obesity is problematic. But it has nothing directly to do with hunger. If it was that easy to re-allocate/re-locate food to the hungry we would already be doing so. But per the article remote and war-torn areas like African nations remain the number one source of severe hunger.
Plus growing food nearer to where it is needed is always cheapest since transport (and related fuel) costs can far exceed the actual food's value. Which brings up a related problem: Water rights/water security. Even if you can build pipes, a region may lack water flow into it if it has been diverted (or destroyed by global climate change).
We might not relocate it though. Dumping massive amounts of international sourced food typically drives down prices so much that the local producers can't make enough money to keep their operations going, and close up shop.
Then when the food aid is turned off, the population has both grown to the level that aid could support, and the local production capacity is less than it originally started, meaning more famine related conflict.
That's an absolutely fantastic point and I thank you for raising it.
This is another example of where infrastructure pays more dividend than simply dropping aid onto areas. You truck in concrete and build a water-way, a region could eat for one hundred years, whereas if you bus in aid they can eat until the aid runs out (and it competes/undercuts local food).
This is why China's effort to build infrastructure (on loan) in this regions[0] is kind of a double-edged sword. While China's motivations may be anything but pure (regional influence/military supply lines/indebting poor countries) the side-effort could be reduced hunger/famine regardless.
You don't even have to do the dumping. Venezuela gov's own program for better food allowed Venezuelans to purchase food from neighboring countries for 'cheap.' The result is that a lot of Venezuelan farmers closed shop during these good times.
Alas, cue hard times, and you have today (or these past ~3 years).
(This is a terrible simplification of Venezuela's ills, I only say it because it is an interesting case where internal food aid did the same destructive thing. It seems if you want lasting food aid, you should always try to make the aid bottom up, from the farmers.)
“In addition to the challenges of stunting and wasting, Asia and Africa are also home to nearly three-quarters of all overweight children worldwide, largely driven by consumption of unhealthy diets.“
I think in this case the link between obesity isn’t on the other side of the world, it’s that those with access to food in these locations don’t have access to healthy food.
There is information that we have enough food to feed 1.5 population of the world, but up to 40% of food is just wasted. To say this is a disaster is not enough to describe the situation.
It's not even that we have to change the diet or something, if we could deliver wasted food to whoever needs it that would be enough.
>Roughly 30 to 40% of food in both the developed and developing worlds is lost to waste, though the causes behind this are very different. ... For example, in India, it is estimated that 35 to 40% of fresh produce is lost because neither wholesale nor retail outlets have cold storage
In food logistics this challenge is called the "cold chain" - you need to build a complete supply chain, from harvesting to production to retail to consumer, with temperature control at every point in the way. It takes quite a lot of capital to create, and good infrastructure to maintain.
Refrigeration is an example cause in developing countries, the paper above says that in developed countries the low price of food itself causes such irresponsible actions.
hunger and poverty are nearly always the result of government. the one percent of this world have always been those who are in government, the super rich are not even fully immune to their effect except in the worst government types.
to correct the issue requires agreement on a world stage where governments which actively harm their people are removed yet even with the most glaring examples we have supposedly advanced countries opposing intervention; the two best examples are the support that North Korea and Venezuela get.
In developed countries, and increasingly in developing countries, vast tracts of farmland are wasted on an extremely inefficient form of food production: passing the energy through an extra trophic level. Furthermore, in developing countries, a large fraction of arable land is used to grow exportable luxury products like tobacco, chocolate, and coffee.
But hunger, globally, is not caused by insufficient production. It is almost entirely a problem with distribution.
Too many people on the planet - feed these 820M hungry people and in 20 years you have 2B hungry people instead. We should provide for a better quality of life for fewer people (in all countries), but given human nature, population control is not exactly feasible.
Somewhat related - every natural population experiencing exponential growth over the long term collapses. And even drastic measures like reducing the population by half only buys you one 'doubling time' which since the 1900s for humans is a very short time... anyone seeing the population graph and thinks this is sustainable is crazy.
Human global population is no longer increasing at an exponential rate.[1]
It's very likely that by ~2060 human fertility rate will drop below "replacement rate" (2.1 children per woman), thus beginning a long, slow decline in population.[2]
At this point I think that hardly matters anymore, the damage is done, there are already too many people. Even if population growth were to drop to < 0 (below replacement) today, this planet can simply not sustain 7.4 billion humans at their current consumption rate. Even less so as that rate is still increasing (as more and more people attain Western standards of living). A trillion ants aren't as impactful as a billion humans are.
impact = population * consumption
One way or another, our impact is going to go down.
This is a rude misconception. Family size is mostly related to child mortality rates. In better off places the population growth is neutral or negative and evidence suggests this is causal, so better circumstance lead to _less_ growth, not more. (Source: Hans Rosling's Factfullness)
I recall family size is most correlated with economy type, I.e. in agrarian economies children are looked upon as an asset (helping in the farm, taking care of their parents) vs an industrial/urban economy where children are “liabilities” the shift between the two is typically the largest driver of a reduction in birth rate (along with increase in education, and access to family planning)
I think the OP mentioned the difference between agrarian and industrial economies. There is a world of difference (this also goes, and relates, to the environmental impact between the two).
You mean that’s not how anyone farms in countries where they are dealing with obesity - that’s very much how people farm in countries where they are dealing with famine
As others have explained in this thread: Yes, easily, the projection is that population will top off soon and start declining. It is unlikely (frankly ridiculous) that we will go extinct in the next few decades because of overpopulation.
Also, be careful with the we/them separation. 'They' will lift themselves out of poverty, just like 'we' did.
This... the them and us dichotomy is really telling.
There are different lenses through which to view the world: a collaborative one.
Someone could also say something similar with regard to pollution, where it’s not the poor countries that are posing today an extension threat to the world.
The idea that poverty is harder on the environment then wealth is one that people are having a hard time wrapping their minds around.
I think it plays against the idea that we should be punished for success and rewarded for frugality. The idea that you can just pay money to get out of environmental problems strikes everyone as unfair.
I think that's a fair description of how the world really works though.
“We should provide for...” is a little troubling. Who is “we”, how did they get to that position and how are they enforcing they’re decisions on who can have food?
I think we wouldn't have problem to double or tripple our food production. The capabilities are available. It is more of a distribution problem. This is why I think a lot of the GM-discussion to solve hunger is a total scam. GM food should bring french fry beans and cream puff trees, nothing else.
Of course there are many ressources that would decline. You are completely correct with that.
"every natural population experiencing exponential growth over the long term collapses. And even drastic measures like reducing the population by half only buys you one 'doubling time'"
But if you halve the population, you aren't experiencing exponential growth. Are we even experiencing exponential growth now, I thought we had passed peak child?
Plus people have been making claims that we cant feed X billion people for the last 70 years, is there any particular reason why your prediction will be correct, where all others weren't?
Ot maybe it's because of all the poison in processed food meant to make people want to eat more of it and also drive down costs with unhealthy filler ingredients and cheaper alternative ingredients
Diet is now a dirty word which has been twisted and broken by marketing execs. the concept of a 8-12 week diet (read: dramatic change of nutritional intake) is laughable as a long term solution.
It has the power to get anyone back down to normal weight. From there they need to make adjustments to not get overweight again. Which will be easier after such a diet, since the habit of eating is already broken, taste buds have reset and the body won't crave energy to maintain his overweight level.
This is, IMHO, the ultimate counter-point to the Hans Rosling / Bill Gates school of optimism and progress.
There were roughly a billion people on earth prior to the industrial revolution. Through growth we have raised the average quality of life, but what does that matter to the nearly constant number of people living lives of hunger and poverty?
It's like trying to fix a web performance problem where 80% of your requests time out by adding so much other traffic that your failure rate is now only 8%. You fixed nothing.
What do you mean _other traffic_? These are different people. Probability that you suffer from hunger in your life reduced from 0.8 to 0.08, an order of magnitude.
If one had choice, one would certainly choose to be born now.
Yes, there is still lots of suffering, but as Rosling says, things can be bad and getting better at the same time
But the point is "things" did not and are not getting better. It's literally right there in the title of the shared article you don't even need to click or read it.
I'm sorry I don't want to turn this into a back and forth internet debate but I feel like you're very deliberately missing the point.
Averages are an abstraction. People are real. "getting better" for those people means ... actually getting better. Its that simple. You're overthinking this and trying to apply mathematical models and abstractions, which don't get me wrong, are very valuable tools. But don't lose your anchor in material reality.
I find it ironic that evolution optimized us for such effective energy storage because of constant food shortages, but now the same food and efficient storage is killing us.
As someone who is into fitness for the last decade I can understand many other people with less willpower to resist the hunger. People can give up drugs, alcohol, smoking, etc, because ultimately you don't need those things to survive, but we do need food to survive and it's so damn easy to overeat. Another bit of irony is that once you give up all those other unhealthy triggers of dopamine, food remains the (only?) main one, making it even so much harder to resist it, considering that apparently obesity is worse for your health than alcohol and smoking combined.
One of many aspects and data points (e.g. regarding the environment and the social horrors of climate change, legitimacy crisis, rise of far right), and so on, that cherry-picking painters of comforting pictures like Hans Rosling and Steven Pinker conveniently forgot...
tl:dr
This underscores the immense challenge of achieving the Sustainable Development Goal of Zero Hunger by 2030, says a new edition of the annual The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report released today.
"Our actions to tackle these troubling trends will have to be bolder, not only in scale but also in terms of multisectoral collaboration," the heads of the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the UN Children's Fund, the World Food Programme and the World Health Organization urged in their joint foreword to the report.
People experiencing moderate food insecurity face uncertainties about their ability to obtain food and have had to reduce the quality and/or quantity of food they eat to get by.
This calls for a profound transformation of food systems to provide sustainably-produced healthy diets for a growing world population.
"The annual UN report also found that income inequality is rising in many of the countries where hunger is on the rise, making it even more difficult for the poor, vulnerable or marginalized to cope with economic slowdowns and downturns."
Why? That doesn't follow at all. Increasing income inequality does not mean that poor people are getting poorer or their lives are getting more difficult in any way. Political grandstanding from the WHO, which is a shame.
Not really, especially with IQ being the pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo it is, and culturally biased. And that's before we add the actual damage to cognition nurturing in a poor, in conflict, etc., environment does, or the opportunity gaps said children have growing up...
It's biased to skills that make the creators of the tests (and their class/education/culture) appear best. Not necessarily the skills that "make a society advanced and competitive".
But even if they were the latter, that's no guarantee that they would be a good way of measuring intelligence.
If I keep you up and prevent you from sleeping for 5 days straight, and then give you an IQ test, I didn't test your intelligence in its actual potential. And if I pitted you against a well rested person, the IQ difference doesn't necessarily measure any real difference in intelligence.
Similarly, if one kid A is brought up in a nurturing family, loved, well fed, well treated medically, educated, surrounded by people reading books etc, compared to a kid B from a poor family, with absent parents working all the time, starving occasionally from lack of money, with no intellectual stimulation and role models, etc -- measuring their respective IQ doesn't tell you whether kid A is inherently smarter than B, nor does it tell that kid B is poorer because it has less IQ...
Those observations are also consistent with "Inverting cause and effect", but not in your position's favour. So one should want to investigate the directions of causality etc., instead of assuming.
>Those observations are also consistent with "Inverting cause and effect", but not in your position's favour.
Actually, they were meant to be both consistent with "Inverting cause and effect" and in my position's favour.
My position isn't that poor areas can't possibly fare lower in IQ tests than richer areas.
It is that (1) IQ tests are not good indicators of human potential (or even of intelligence), (2) IQ tests are biased against poorer people and cultures, (3) poorer people aren't poor because of low IQ, if anything it's the opposite (both in that such tests are stacked against poorer people with less education, and because poverty related stress, lack of nutrition etc, can stall development and thus make you fare worse in cognitive tests, in ways that the exact same person, genetics-wise, wouldn't if they had a richer upbringing).
Hacker News is basically a list of problems that need solving, or startups/libraries/repos/products that are trying to solve a problem. World hunger is probably one of the biggest problems, so frankly this should be pinned to the top of the home page until somebody finds a way to solve it ;)
It's actually not a list of problems but list of technological tries to solve a problem, thus it has a 'hacker' in the name. There is nearly infinite amount of problems all around the world of various levels of importance, shall they be reported and pinned here as well, like climate stuff, food/water pollution, health, etc. "untill somebody finds a way to solve it"?
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
Hunger/famine is generally caused by regional problems for example poor infrastructure or security. If lack of infrastructure doesn't allow the movement of goods (e.g. food/aid) or water, it doesn't matter how much "excess" food there is elsewhere you cannot get it to where it is needed, and ditto with moving supplies into areas safely.
If you want to combat hunger, build more roads, water pipes, and improve regional security. Pointing out that there's a spare/excess $1 bag of corn on the opposite side of the world isn't constructive, because it would cost $100 to get that $1 bag of corn to where hunger is (e.g. sea, train, then air drop, and that ignores corruption/spoilage).
Obesity is problematic. But it has nothing directly to do with hunger. If it was that easy to re-allocate/re-locate food to the hungry we would already be doing so. But per the article remote and war-torn areas like African nations remain the number one source of severe hunger.
Plus growing food nearer to where it is needed is always cheapest since transport (and related fuel) costs can far exceed the actual food's value. Which brings up a related problem: Water rights/water security. Even if you can build pipes, a region may lack water flow into it if it has been diverted (or destroyed by global climate change).