Microblog Memes

many famines we have in history aren’t because of sociopolitical issues

That's increasingly untrue, particularly in the last century. To say we've got some kind of food shortage, you have to ignore everything from the Irish Potato Famine (in which English storehouses were so full of wheat that it rotted on the docks) to the Bengalese Famine (in which Churchill diverted foodstock away from East Indian ports as retribution for the wave of independence movements breaking out in the wake of WW2) to the US policy of buffalo hunting to near-extinction as a form of Indian removal to the engineered famines in Iraq and Palestine and North Korea and Cuba under international sanctions regimes.

What's more, where we've successfully ended the 19th century streak of famines, what we've seen is explicit socio-economic policy to improve foodstock production and distribution. This isn't an ecological problem (yet). It is entirely a logistics issue. We yield far more foodstock than we consume. And we've known we were producing more than we consume straight back to the early 20th century. Famous Russian anarchist theorist Peter Kropotkin even wrote a book on the subject, complete with a health amount of data analysis to support his theories, supporting the claim that then-modern wheat production should have already eliminated famine pretty much globally.