So you say you're an altruist...

John_Maxwell

I'd be really interested to hear what the Less Wrong community thinks of this. Don't spoil it by reading the comments first.

There is already enough food to feed everyone in the world twice over

Really? That sounds like it should mean we have a massive waste problem. Enough food to feed (entire world's population + everyone who is not being fed now) is constantly being discarded. In that counterfactual world we really should be using food leftovers to produce fuel.

CarlShulman's mentioned food waste in developing nations, but there's non-negligible food waste elsewhere too. On a bigger scale, the EU's Common Agricultural Policy used to be infamous in the 70s and 80s for generating surplus beef & butter "mountains", although this is apparently a negligible problem now.

14CarlShulman15y

There actually is massive waste due to food spoilage, e.g. in India and other regions with poor transport infrastructure, but the big effect here is that crops go to feed meat animals (and, to a much lesser extent, biofuel) instead of humans, with low efficiency. If global income inequality were reduced (through increasing incomes of the current poor) this would bid up food prices and result in the current rich cutting back on meat consumption while the current poor increased plant (and to a lesser degree, meat) consumption. Of course, with uneven development you get situations like massive increases in meat production in China while things become harder for those in the worst-off countries due to increased food prices (at least in the short-term).

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So you say you're an altruist...

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So you say you're an altruist...

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