• ObjectivityIncarnate@lemmy.world
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    11 days ago

    When people say it would cost x to solve world hunger, they are talking about those “underlying societal and infrastructure issues”.

    And those issues cannot be fixed simply by throwing money at them, making “the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos could end world hunger with a snap of their bony fingers” a deeply ignorant statement.

    So, yes. Everything can be solved with money. You can hire people to “fundamentally understand local political dynamics”, invest in research, pay to fund the programs that will enable impoverished regions to develop the means to build the infrastructure to feed themselves.

    And then the warlords steal the food and redistribute it as they see fit.

    You’re deeply naive about the reality of the circumstances in places where hunger is still a major problem.

    The bottom line is, you can’t truly solve world hunger until you solve world peace, and you can’t solve world peace with money.

    There are still places in the world where slavery is legal, for fuck’s sake. Do you really, truly think things like this could still be true in 2024 if money and what/who you can buy/hire were actually the solution?

    • smiletolerantly@awful.systems
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      11 days ago

      And then the warlords steal the food and redistribute it as they see fit.

      No, you are willfully misunderstanding my point.

      There are still places in the world where slavery is legal, for fuck’s sake. Do you really, truly think things like this could still be true in 2024 if money and what/who you can buy/hire were actually the solution?

      Absolutely.

      Throwing money at solving the surface layer issues / symptoms is moot, but yes, for every new layer of problem you uncover you can ask “so what are the causes for that” until you reach something that can be fixed wit money.

      Og, and I do not believe that this has anything to do with world peace. The nations on earth without hunger problems aren’t peaceful utopias either, after all. But on the other hand, hunger does seem to cause a lot of instability…

      • ObjectivityIncarnate@lemmy.world
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        11 days ago

        for every new layer of problem you uncover you can ask “so what are the causes for that” until you reach something that can be fixed wit money.

        This is just a naive assumption.

        The statement that a single billionaire’s wealth can not only solve world hunger, but do it so easily as to compare it to a snap of the fingers, is frankly, comically absurd, and exposes not only a massive ignorance of the root causes of the starvation that is still occurring in the modern day, but even for those issues which CAN be solved with an injection of funds, a massive ignorance of just how MUCH funding it would take.

        As one tiny example, the US, a single country, spends over 1 TRILLION on welfare, not once or in total, but annually. And a mere FOUR percent of Earth’s population lives there.

        Even the wealthiest human being on the planet’s net worth is nothing compared to what it would take to solve even the small minority of issues cold hard cash can solve. You have no sense of perspective and scale on this.