Comment by hedora
1 year ago
Hunger is a political problem at this point.
We destroy more than enough food to end world hunger, but actually distributing that food to the people that need it would undermine the authority of lots of well-armed organizations.
De-weaponizing food distribution would do a heck of a lot more than further reducing the percentage of the population that works in agriculture.
Put another way, 10% of the US works in agriculture-related fields (including restaurants, food processing and textile manufacturing), but only 1.2% works on farms:
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery...
Driving farm jobs from 1.2% to 0% isn’t going to move food costs or availability very much, and it’d barely be perceptible to the economy at large.
It's not a political problem if somebody actually has to do the physical work of growing the crops and harvesting them. Somebody has to do them and that somebody wants to get paid for it.
If you could remove the somebody from the chain then the entire cost to produce food at that point would be "fiction", ie it would be possible to make it free. But as long as human labor is involved in the production it cannot be free.
Currently, the labor is so cheap (per pound of food) that we pay one group to produce it, and then pay another group to transport and dispose of it.
I’d argue that production labor is close enough to free for all practical purposes.
Focusing on distribution or environmental impact would have significantly more practical impact.