Comment on All this produce is going to spoil at the food bank where I volunteer
exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days agohow does waste prevent a shortage from becoming a famine ?
Making the expected production a higher number than the expected need will give the headroom necessary to deal with a shortage without people starving.
If you’re aiming to produce food for a population of 100,000, but have the capacity to make food for 200,000, then you can afford to waste half of your food without starvation. You can also accommodate a 50% drop in production without starvation.
So that buffer is expected waste, but it’s also starvation resistance.
And009@lemmynsfw.com 3 days ago
That potential waste of food can be transported to another group of people
exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
If you’re accommodating another group of people you should produce enough to always feed them, too, not just sometimes in surplus years. The whole point is that you’ve gotta plan for a surplus, otherwise you risk starvation in bad years (and it doesn’t make it any better, morally, if the people who bear the risk of starving are “another group or people”).
kuberoot@discuss.tchncs.de 3 days ago
I think the point is that if you do that, then you’re just increasing the amount of people in the equation, and if they become dependent on you and the production drops, somebody will be lacking food again.
And009@lemmynsfw.com 3 days ago
Don’t feed because they might be in need?
kuberoot@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days ago
Overproduce to cover everybody’s needs, and if you want to use that overproduction to cover somebody else’s problems, make that the new target and produce over it to keep a safety margin. Otherwise you’re just going to hide the problem and run into trouble when production dips.
Not saying this is the right approach, but this is the idea I’m getting from the thread. I feel like it might not work with the economics of supply and demand combined with capitalistic greed, but if a margin exists as safety, allocating it removes that safety.