Food runs

[Kyriakos]

Sometimes I make food runs to McDonalds in the late night

At least you don't do those for them.

 

[Hygro]

I guess the question is trust. How would coalitions form and along what lines? Say the famine lasts a year and perfect distribution saves half (so hoarding leads to the death of even more).

 

[Samson]

UN chief ‘hopeful’ about averting global food shortage

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned of a “global food shortage” in the coming months due to issues linked to the war in Ukraine, but said he is “hopeful” the crisis can be averted.
Guterres said he is in “intense contact” with Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, the US and the European Union to try and resume Ukrainian grain shipments and revive Russian fertiliser exports.
“I am hopeful, but there is still a way to go,” he said during a food security meeting at the UN hosted by Blinken. “The complex security, economic and financial implications require goodwill on all sides.”​

 

[Joij21]

I wonder if the rich have enough capacity for violence that they do not get eaten by the poor

And then the poor eat the rich.

I mean there is only a limited amount of rich and many more poor. Meaning the poor will have to kill and eat their fellow poor since that is where most of the caloric biomass is distributed.

One will run out of rich to consume eventually.

 

[Samson]

More than 200,000 face starvation in Somalia as rains fail

Nearly a quarter of a million people are facing starvation in Somalia as drought worsens and global food prices hover near record highs, United Nations agencies have said.

The agencies said on Monday that a fourth consecutive rainy season had failed in the Horn of Africa country, and meteorologists are warning of another below-average rainy season later this year as the world’s climate becomes more erratic.
​

 

[Aiken_Drumn]

Yeah we don't have to imagine this situation.. Plenty are starving to death across the globe.

 

[Samson]

WFP suspends part of its food aid in South Sudan as funds dry up

The United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP) has suspended part of its food aid in South Sudan due to a funding shortage – heightening the risk of starvation for 1.7 million people.

The move to suspend aid will affect almost a third of the 6.2 million people in South Sudan the WFP had planned to assist this year. It comes as global food prices soar amid the Russia-Ukraine war, leaving humanitarian agencies working in Africa to work with funding shortfalls.

Climate change is also exacerbating the situation, with South Sudan facing severe flooding, localised drought as well as man-made conflict that has left more than 60 percent of the population grappling with severe hunger.

Badejo-Sanogo, who was speaking from Juba, South Sudan’s capital, said the WFP urgently needs $426m to cover needs for the next six months and dial back what she described as an “explosive situation”.
The WFP said it had exhausted all options before suspending food assistance, including halving rations in 2021.

It said that following the food aid suspension, it is now hoping to reach 4.5 million South Sudanese in need, including 87,000 people already experiencing famine-like conditions.​

 

[AmazonQueen]

How rich is rich? "Kinda well-off" isn't bad, right?

You'd be dessert.

 

[Hygro]

You won’t get to choose your side in a an actual class war.

 

[Farm Boy]

We like to pretend stuff works out better than it does. It's more romantic that way.

Spoiler :

 

[Samson]

World hunger rising as UN agencies warn of ‘looming catastrophe’

Note this is all BEFORE the Ukraine war.

The number of people affected by hunger globally rose to as many as 828 million in 2021, according to a new UN report that provides fresh evidence that the world is moving in reverse, away from the Sustainable Development Goal of ending hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition in all its forms, by 2030, when the SDGs are supposed to be realized.

That represents an increase of about 46 million since 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic plunged the world’s economy into a downward spiral, and 150 million more since 2019.

The 2022 edition of The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report presents updates on the food security and nutrition situation around the world, including the latest estimates of the cost and affordability of a healthy diet.​

• As many as 828 million people were affected by hunger in 2021 – 46 million people more from a year earlier and 150 million more from 2019.
• After remaining relatively unchanged since 2015, the proportion of people affected by hunger jumped in 2020 and continued to rise in 2021, to 9.8 percent of the world population. This compares with 8 percent in 2019 and 9.3 percent in 2020.
• Around 2.3 billion people in the world (29.3 percent) were moderately or severely food insecure in 2021 – 350 million more compared to before the outbreak of the pandemic. Nearly 924 million people faced food insecurity at severe levels, an increase of 207 million in two years.
• The gender gap in food insecurity continued to rise in 2021 - 31.9 percent of women in the world were moderately or severely food insecure, compared to 27.6 percent of men – a gap of more than 4 percentage points, compared with 3 percentage points in 2020.
• Almost 3.1 billion people could not afford a healthy diet in 2020, up 112 million from 2019, reflecting the effects of inflation in consumer food prices stemming from the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the measures put in place to contain it.
• An estimated 45 million children under the age of five were suffering from wasting, the deadliest form of malnutrition, which increases children’s risk of death by up to 12 times. Another 149 million children under the age of five had stunted growth and development due to a chronic lack of essential nutrients in their diets, while 39 million were overweight.

As usual, it is women who bear the brunt of it

 

[Lohrenswald]

Half the people can be fed with careful distribution. How does your country fracture?

I doubt there's enough for half tbh

I don't think it'll like, fracture in the sense that the unity of the state is broken, but the people might trust the state less

 

[Zardnaar]

All those YouTube videos about NZ being a comparatively good place to sit out the apocalypse are starting to make sense.

 

[innonimatu]

First answer: a north south split.

definitely not a realistic scenario, just asking how you wonder your country might fracture in a scarcity great enough to undermine the nation from within

It's absolutely impossible to even discuss the question without some "real" context. Historical precedents show all kinds of things.

Even seemingly "intuitive" ideas like "those who produce the food at least get to be among the ones who eat" are not true. In Ireland the wealthy (and often absent) landowners had their lackeys take the food from the indebted tenants, exported it for sale, and let the peasants starve to death. The lackeys ate, the landowners got more gold, half the peasants fled or starved to death. And @thetrooper the poor did not ate the rich. The (british) troops enforcing property rights ate too.

Who has the guns gets food, I guess. And who controls the ones who have the guns, obviously.

What kind of psycho would order an overnight mandate like that?

A psycho clinging to power in an already near-bankrupt country and looking for excuses to cut imports? This "it's one man's fault" or "it was an organics thing" to me stinks of attempting to hide Sri Lanka's problem of unplayable foreign debt while facing creditors who would demand their pound of flesh.
I bet the psycho was last year while doing this also busy spending the country's last reserves of foreign currency to cover capital export by himself and his cronies. Haven't checked it but it's the logical explanation.

We'll see similar crazyness with energy in Europe soon enough. Despite this supposedly being a wealthy place. Oh, and fertilizers.

 

[emzie]

Global food runs, but for some far fetched reason it’s within country by country and not country vs country. Half the people can be fed with careful distribution. How does your country fracture?

Half? That's such an extreme that I'd expect the answer to be universal: everything collapses everywhere. Earth would be one giant Leningrad, with no "outside" source of relief. People with guns survive better than most. Dead bodies would be priceless as a source of calories. Those last two sentences would probably overlap.