Greenspun is spot on with most of this, IMO. Singer might be a great ethicist, but he seems to have no concept of the simple rules of economics and industry. I respect his intentions, of course, but good intentions without good information are useless - worse than useless, even.<p>A country that's short on food should have a powerful, built-in incentive to, you know, <i>grow food</i>. If the elites aren't letting that happen, there's a powerful incentive for the population to oppose them. If there's no economy, it gives incentive to create one. It might be painful for the West to watch as the wheels too-slowly start to turn, but turn they will, eventually.<p>But in Singer's mind, it's "unethical" to watch this process, so he wants to interfere with foreign aid - removing all local incentives and basically putting an entire country on welfare. And because the whole mainstream society is in the same boat, there's no "social shame" incentives to get off welfare - it just becomes "food from God", or, worse, from the next best thing, the local dictator. Now the country's even worse off, really. They're addicted to foreign aid like Heroin.<p>It might sound cold but incentives are the only proven way to make anyone do anything. Those incentives don't have to be money - I hope that one day we can get rid of money and work for the pride of recognition, or for some other reasons - but clearly for now, we need money or trade or whatever to motivate people. Take that away, flood a market with free food, and no-one is going to start a farm. Why should they? The incentives are gone. Worse, they've been perverted: better off to try and control the supply of the free food!<p>It's not impossible, though. If we really do want to provide a baseline food diet for everyone in the world, and it certainly is a noble idea, then we just have to provide a baseline food buying program for everyone in the world, too. You can't buy from one market, strengthening their food industry, to dump on another, destroying theirs. But if you promise to buy from both and distribute a baseline to those in need - maybe it's possible. However, there is the small matter of that you'd be commencing a global experiment in command economy unprecedented in history ;)