Will there be widespread famine because of global recession and how best to prevent starvation?
If there’s one place a recession doesn’t tend to hit, it’s food production. Even when families are trying to save money, they have to eat. Farmers are still going to produce as much this year as they did last year (unless there’s a big freeze, or flood, or drought or some other natural disaster that would affect agriculture). There will probably be a degree of inflation in developing countries that will make it harder for families to pay for food, but that’s not a famine. Famine is the lack of available food. Having food available but not being able to pay for it is a different story. The prevention part is tough. The gut-instinct answer is to make sure staples like rice and corn are donated to the developing countries so people can eat. But, if you flood a West African nation with cheap rice, all that does is make it harder for the West African rice farmers to sell their crop. You feed some, but starve others. It’s a tough situation…
