It is amazing to see this on the top of HN right after I get off a call with my mother about sending more emergency remittances to my uncle's family in remote east Ethiopia/Ogaden. The situation there is very dire with all the livestock (all their wealth) perished, no rains from this year's Deyr rainy season that just ended and no working wells for groundwater.<p>If anyone is reading this and wants to help with the crisis situation there, please donate to The Denan Project[1] which is basically the only aid group on the ground. All the majors (Oxfam, ICRC, etc) have been awol during this year's extreme drought (worst in more than 30 years). 100% of donations go to directly supporting people with food and water aid, medical aid (we built the only clinic for hundreds of miles) and other direct support. All overhead costs are already covered by the very generous, selfless folks behind The Denan Project.<p>Dick Young, founder of The Denan Project wrote a letter to the editor response to this same article by Alex de Waal in the NYT: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/opinion/ethiopia-and-the-end-of-famine.html?_r=0" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/opinion/ethiopia-and-the-e...</a><p>[1]: <a href="http://www.thedenanproject.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.thedenanproject.org/</a>
Across the world we really need to start providing free food at a national level-<p>1. Many large nations already heavily subsidise food for food security as it stands. We need to avoid butter mountains and milk lakes because it's wasteful.<p>2. Many first world countries already feed their population to high school level anyway.<p>2. A national plan for good, healthy, free food will prompt people to eat properly, on average it would encourage responsible eating (you can only get so big eating potatoes, broccoli and meat, it's the heavily processed stuff that is dangerous).<p>3. Job Automation is going to change our work situations anyway, within 5 years alone we'll have taxi drivers and hauliers without jobs. Once AI removes these jobs we'll have serious problems on our hands with unemployment.<p>4. If everyone didn't have to struggle with the time and money to feed themselves maybe we could concentrate on what's more important, like getting to mars or something.
It's easy to not realize that without major single headline grabbing breakthroughs, progress on ending these injustices is still ongoing. So it's a refreshing reminder to see articles like this one every now and then, specially after such a hard year.
From the headline only: no.<p>Why? Because we still have political strife in the world, and political strife has been the root cause of famine for over a thousand years.<p>If anything our political systems are gearing us up for even more devastating famines, as countries turn inward and more oppressive.
<i>"Some 795 million people in the world do not have enough food to lead a healthy active life. That's about one in nine people on earth."</i> [0]<p>that's more people than were alive globally in 1700 [1]. looks like the last 300 years have been a complete catastrophe with respect to hunger.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats" rel="nofollow">https://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.census.gov/population/international/data/worldpop/table_history.php" rel="nofollow">https://www.census.gov/population/international/data/worldpo...</a>
There shouldn't be any hunger. We produce enough food to feed 10 billion people. There are only 8 billion people. Yet 20'000 die everyday of (capitalism) hunger.