Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
in the US Midwest who grows corn and soybeans to sell to the market. The farmer is
not going to grow the crops in the first place if he or she must hand it over (after keep-
ing just enough to satiate the family), gratis, to the hungry. This is especially true if the
farmer must deliver it to hungry populations who inconveniently happen to live over-
seas. The simplistic redistribution argument fails to account for the cost of transport,
among other things.
Hunger is, in essence, an economic problem. Access to food is a function of wealth.
If hungry people had enough money, they would not be hungry. I doubt anyone would
challenge my assertion that, of the billion hungry humans on the planet today, not one
of them is financially wealthy. Hungry people, invariably, have insufficient financial
resources to purchase food; the cost of food is beyond their financial resources. Penury
and hunger are proxies for each other; they are so inextricably linked that we could erad-
icate starvation by providing the hungry with either food or money. Given food, the
hungry would eat it directly; given sufficient cash, they'd be able to buy food to satiate
their hunger.
This brings us to a more compelling illustrative analogy. There is plenty of wealth in
the world, so we can eradicate poverty simply by redistributing wealth from the rich
to the poor. Poverty has also been with us throughout recorded human history, as has
hunger, and the apparently simple solution to both problems has always been avail-
able: redistribution. But never in our human history has this solution been adopted, at
least not on a large scale. This is another example of a relatively straightforward techni-
cal solution, but one that is politically impracticable.
So until someone figures out a way to get the rich to hand over their excess money,
and farmers to produce food without getting paid to do so, we will have to contend with
hunger and poverty, fighting them as best we can. This is unlikely to include waiting
around for someone else to figure out how to redistribute the wealth and food.
An alternative to solving the hunger problem by redistributing either money or food,
which—as we've seen—may be a technical solution but politically impossible, could
instead involve approaching the problem economically and in a politically palatable
manner: reducing the cost of food. An axiom of a functional free market economy holds
that supply and demand dictate price. The price rises when demand exceeds supply, the
price drops in times of plenty. In a given market, hungry people cannot buy food because
the relationship between food supply and consumer demand sets a price too high for
the impoverished hungry to afford. We can reduce the price, without political interven-
tion, by either reducing the demand for food or increasing the supply of food. Reducing
the demand is impracticable wherever there is poverty, as the penurious cannot simply
ignore their hunger as easily as they might suppress their wish for a new yacht.
The more pragmatic and realistic option is to increase the food supply. Increasing
the amount of food in this market will quench demand and the price will drop, allow-
ing more people to buy more food and satiating the hunger of at least some of the
impoverished.
Taking action to reduce hunger and poverty means using every available tool until
that tool is shown unequivocally to cause more harm than good. Biotechnology has not
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