Video: Can Capitalism Solve World Hunger?


In writing about yesterday’s good news, I mentioned the fact that we currently produce more food than is needed to end world hunger. As usual, Second Thought provides a nice, approachable overview of the scale of the problem, why capitalism cannot solve world hunger (and why, as I’ve explained, that means capitalism also can’t solve the coming famines caused by global warming).

There’s one point I wanted to add that’s often left out of conversations about this topic. As I briefly discussed in this post, there’s a big portion of farmland that could grow food for people, but is instead dedicated to growing food for livestock. While some of that is hay, a lot of it is various grains fed to livestock like cattle. That means that actually feeding everyone with our current system would require a shift away from animal agriculture. Basically, we need to start growing more food for us, and less food for our food. I can imagine a variety of reasons why this is left out so often, but that speculation on that matters less to me than just correcting the deficiency.

What the video DOES cover well is the role that the IMF and World Bank has played in the unequal distribution of food, for the sake of profits for the upper class of wealth countries. With all of that said, I hope you enjoy the video!

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