If GMOs exist why do we have world hunger?
In: Engineering
The problem with world hunger isn’t the lack of food, it’s the logistics and the ability to transport the food to everyone who needs it.
Also GMOs aren’t magic.
People are talking like the main problem here is logistics. That’s true in certain cases, particularly conflict zones. It tends to be true in times of famine or acute food shortage. But mostly the problem is the failure of subsistence farming and lack of money to buy food. Lots of the world’s hungry people don’t live in remote inaccessible places, they live in cities. Sometimes even cities in rich countries.
Some people produce their own food (or food for small communities). These people are often hit by problems like soil erosion, climate change, population growth, and so-on.
Most people, including farmers producing “cash crops”, have to buy the bulk of their food. This costs money. *Poverty* is the main cause of hunger.
Why haven’t GM crops fixed this? Well partly because the improvements they offer have been modest so far. There are a lot of different challenges to growing food more efficiently and reliably. Also because their adoption has been slowed by lots of factors, concerns about safety, sustainability and control of food supplies, some justified, some unjustified. (The way GMOs were originally pushed was basically a disaster for their public image.)
Then there *is* the impact of the cost of distribution. GM tech doesn’t reduce the cost of running a ship or a lorry, a shop or a market stall, running safety checks, or all the other assorted costs that go into the final price of food.
So GMOs haven’t led to a big reduction in the cost of food and made it more affordable for the world’s poor.
Because it’s not enough to produce sufficient amount of food. You also need to distribute it.
Countries with hunger problem usually also have insufficient infrastructure, preventing viable distribution of food.
And even that aside, companies do stuff for profit. This includes food production. It’s expensive to ship food across the globe and have it stay high enough quality/fresh. If they can’t make money out of it, they won’t do it.
This is because “world hunger” has nothing to do with if humanity as a whole can produce enough food. Humanity is capable of producing an excess of food for everyone who needs it.
The trouble is actually getting the people fed. Food elsewhere doesn’t feed hungry people who are in the middle of nowhere, or in the middle of a war zone, or in a dysfunctional country where everything is mismanaged. Those things are barriers to getting hungry people fed; there is more than enough food donated through altruism to feed all the needy people.
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