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The flip side is if we didn’t waste so much food, farmers (often in poorer countries) would lose a lot of money. While I’m certainly a fan of frugality, I’m no
by ARandomerDude 2y ago
The flip side is if we didn’t waste so much food, farmers (often in poorer countries) would lose a lot of money.
While I’m certainly a fan of frugality, I’m not going to lose sleep about over-hiring rice farmers in Ecuador.
- ajuc 2y agoThat's a common mistake when thinking about economy (so called broken window fallacy). It's not actually making lives of people in poor countries better when we waste more of what they produce. Food becoming more expansive just means middleman will have higher margin, and the poor people will starve more.
- croes 2y agoThe same is true, the other way around. If we waste less, money lose their jobs and can't afford food. You can bet that it's always the poor who pay the price.
- ajuc 2y agoIt's not. Scarcity is bad for poor people, abundance is good. In the limit - if food is abundant to the point of being worthless - nobody starves. If the food is so rare it's more expansive than gold - almost everybody starves.
- croes 2y agoFood is already abundant but it rather gets destroyed than sold for nothing.
- ajuc 2y agoIt's not abundant enough. When it was more scarce - more people starved. Starvation was common even in Europe till the end of WW2 (because after WW2 cheap artificial fertillizers were introduced). And that starvation happened mostly in unindustrialized countries (meaning - 90%+ of population worked in agriculture).
- fransje26 2y ago> I’m not going to lose sleep about over-hiring rice farmers in Ecuador It's possibly the subsidised US farmer who is going to loose money, not the poor Ecuadorian or African farmer..