> If we help boost agriculture productivity and work on our economy most people will be able to buy food.
"Most people" simply isn't good enough.
Free markets generally work great for items that are not necessities. Efficiency, variety, and innovation is incentivized. But you always end up with some people who can't afford the items. If they're not a necessity, that's perfectly fine. But food is a necessity, and always having some people who can't afford food is not acceptable.
Famine isn't the issue. A famine is when there simply isn't enough food within a population. The issue at hand is when there's enough food that isn't well distributed, which is a completely different phenomenon.
No. Famine means a widespread lack of food. The problem for the people starving isn't famine, because if it was, there would be a lot more people starving. The problem is that they lack food. "Famine" is not a synonym for that.
Why doesn't the US have a distribution problem? Two reasons: 1) we produce so much that it covers up a lot of inefficiencies in the system and 2) widely available government assistance. Despite this, people do still go hungry here.
Dance around all you want, but we're still stuck with the "inconvenient truth" that poor people in the US are almost always over-fed. They're not starving. (The exceptions are folks who don't like the free food, which makes them a lot like the folks who are homeless because they don't like the free shelter.)
Where else are the poor as well off? (Inequality does not make someone less well off. Well off is what you have, regardless of what someone else has.)
Why is that an inconvienient truth, exactly? I don't understand why the excellent access to food of the American poor has anything to do with whether the free market can feed everyone.
> I don't understand why the excellent access to food of the American poor has anything to do with whether the free market can feed everyone.
It's the (mostly) free market that is producing that food at low cost and in such large amounts.
As I asked at the beginning, where do you have both free markets and starving people? I ask because it's easy to find places with starving people, yet they're not uniformly distributed.
And, how many places with not free markets manage to not have starving people and/or the occasional famine?
> How are the crops doing in the US this summer, btw?
Not particularly well. We'll have to reduce our exports and draw down some of our reserves.
In other words, our poor people can continue to be fat, not starving. They might buy fewer TVs for a while or reduce the amount of processed calories to handle the extra cost.
We can have several years of bad crops before we'll have a food shortage.
Of course, it would help if we stopped using food for automobile fuel. (The brazilians would love to sell us methanol for less but they don't have an early presidential primary.)
"Most people" simply isn't good enough.
Free markets generally work great for items that are not necessities. Efficiency, variety, and innovation is incentivized. But you always end up with some people who can't afford the items. If they're not a necessity, that's perfectly fine. But food is a necessity, and always having some people who can't afford food is not acceptable.