World starvation-its simple. If you want to make something scarce and insufficient, put a price on it?

Question

1st tenet in economics "For anything to have a price, it must be scarce and insufficient at some level". Land which lies unused, and food mountains, milk getting strewed all over, and coffee getting chucked into the sea, and more, are all examples of withholding to keep the prices up. In this world, for everybody to be fed would mean abundance, which would mean gluts and no price. free, which indeed would not be good for business. Business, its exchange, its money charging for physical needs causes world starvation. Nb: charging for non physical needs does not cause death. I would love to be proved wrong. But this is the economics we are taught. Its the economics we experience We need to do something about it, as fast as possible.

Answer 1

OK, now you need to design a research program that could empirically test your theory... The reality, however, seems to be at odds with your theorizing...

Today, the world produces more food than it consumes. Starvation that we see in isolated pockets here and there usually happens to coincide either with a war that drives farmers off their lands (as in, for example, Ethiopia) or with an oppressive government that puts its military ambitions ahead of making sure its people are properly fed (as in, say, North Korea).

Answer 2

You have just displayed a level economic ignorance that is enormous even for this section of Yahoo! Answers.

FREE government owned, government run, government controlled eduction has been handing out worthless diplomas for at least 20 years. I can't wait until all our food is free, also.
Did you not see Russians standing in bread lines?

Now you can go back to worshiping Ralph Nader and Michael Moore who, by the way, own a lot of stock in the Stock Market.

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Answer 3

I think you have some stuff right and some stuff wrong in your question.

It is not necessary to have sacrcity to have a price; scarcity drives prices up yes, but there is a price even when there is no scarcity.

Theoretically the price on th emarket is the price where how much people want to buy is equal to how much is produced. Scarcity is when, given the price, people want more than what is produced. They could only get more if they offer higher prices encouraging production, thereby prices are driven up.

However, you are right about the dumping of food in a world where people are hungry. People are hungry only in the deepest recesses of Africa where warlords hold sway, there are hungry people everywhere, more in Adis Ababa than in New York or London, but that doesn't mean there are none in New York on London.

As to why that happens is pure politics.

The farming lobbies in the developed economies are extremely strong. Somehow people find the idea of farming for a living, against all odds inspiring, romantic may be and are willing to subsidise these farmers. The subsidies come from government coffers and can take many forms...

The governments buy the farmers produce at a price above what they could buy on the world market while preventing products from overseas from competing. This results in stockpiles of local products that are often dumped since it costs too much to keep, or to give away (and if you give away, you make world prices even lower and have to subsidise your farmers even more!).

Another way would be to invent some frivolous rule to block products from poor farmers; for example using banana curvature as a criteria to deny entry to different variety of bananas which are grown in countries with different climate, or by farmers hwo do not have access to spme specified type of banana which is grown by friendly large corporations.

This also hurts the poor foreign farmers, and does nothing to allevaite the plight of farmers, keeps their children in the fields rather than in school, keeps them in a poverty trap.

All this is illustrated by the collapse of the Doha round of WTO negotiations which foundered mainly on the refusal of some developed countries to remove subsidies on their farmers and protection of their agricultural sectors.

What we can do is lobby our own representatives to decrease subsidies to farmers and instead use the money to divert them to other sources of livelihood by retraining. Everybody has the right to earn a living, but when you drive huge cars at the expense of people who can't even send their children to school to give them hope for a better future, something is wrong.

Answer 4

You can find food for free all over the world.

Not all land is worth growing food on, but the land that is productive is growing food at record levels.