Except that’s not true? China had much worse famines before the communist revolution, and both China and the USSR never had a famine after the ones you are thinking about.
Meanwhile, we hear every 5 years that hundreds of thousands of people will die of hunger on the Horn of Africa, that millions of people are food insecure at the seat of capitalist power (the US, UK etc.). We see breadlines in the UK, families going hungry because of foodstamp cuts.
And then you see Vietnam, China, Cuba… and they have eliminated famine. Not hunger, but famine. Meaning there are no food insecure people. The USSR had done the same before it collapsed. People in the USSR had better food security than people in the US after the 50s.
You basically don’t know what you’re talking about and are just repeating propaganda points from the Cold War. It’s vibes based ideology, no facts or science.
millions of people are food insecure at the seat of capitalist power (the US, UK etc.). We see breadlines in the UK, families going hungry because of foodstamp cuts.
There's food insecure people in China too. It's not different in that respect at all.
There is, but when people say “eliminate hunger” or “food insecurity” in these neolib global think tanky way they mean statistically eliminate them.
China has better food security than Italy, Greece, Singapore, South Korea etc. and you’d never associate those countries with hunger or food insecurity.
I would suggest not drawing the line between capitalist corporate societies and authoritarian communist dictatorships. Not every message needs to be about government models.
I take a message like this to start a conversation about cooperation instead of greed.
Conceptually, I don't see it scaling to 8 billion people.
But the great thing is that we can all individually make the choice to operate this way within our smaller communities, and offer support to those in need when we can afford to. You can even scale this concept down to your family or your team at work. Cooperation can convert certain resources away from being a fixed-sum game.
There's a larger issue of paltering within the previous statement in that it artificially limits the time span under scrutiny and to the headline famines (rather than sum totals) to railroad a specific political inference in service of an anti-collectivist meme.
I'm just trying to support cooperation with the idea of starting small with our friend who isn't ready to think big about it yet. I think people need to experience immersive demonstrations to understand the amplification power of cooperation.
That's certainly commendable but it ignores the power of easily repeated lies.
There is great value in earnest discussion. It, however, requires all sides to be ingenuous. If someone's opening gambit is calculated artifice then all you are doing is giving them soapbox from which to bend pliable minds to their regressive agenda. By all means try to draw them into open discussion but only within a framework of honest representation.
I'm not agreeing with op but for this meme it does make sense to limit the timeframe. Production and worldwide logistics have only recently given us the ability to feed everyone on earth reliably and consistently.
Two hundred years ago a surplus in Argentina couldn't easily be applied to a failed crop in Bangladesh. The world as a whole now produces more than enough food and we have the ability to transport it from anywhere to anywhere. We just don't do it. In the past hunger sometimes couldn't be avoided, now it could.
It's true that the transport system is much faster and reliable now than the 1840’s but you didn't need a Prime subscription to lift a famine. Transport back then was still fast enough.
The conditions that cause famines lasted multiple seasons/years and they didn't drop in over night either. Famine struck areas slide into scarcity slowly as the price of the cheapest food available rises above what is affordable by the poorest in that society.
In some areas, such as the Irish potato famine in the 1840’s, there was still a surplus of food being exported to markets that could afford it. Aid, when it eventually arrived in Ireland came from Britain, USA, Indian Ocean, France, Canada, West Indies, Australia, Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, south America, Russia, Latin America, the Ottoman Empire, Spain, Portugal and other British Dependencies. The world was much more connected back then than you may be aware.