World hunger: the biggest problem with the easiest fix

About 9 million people on this planet starve to death in the average year. That’s almost 25,000 a day, around 1,000 an hour, something like one every four seconds. About 820 million more people will spend this year not dying from hunger, but at risk of doing so, according to a U.N. report published in 2022. The sum amounts to more than one in 10 human beings.

It’s a grim reality with profound implications for the heartland of the number one food-exporting country in the world. People can only eat if food gets to them. And it only gets to them if they can afford it. All too often, they can’t.

It’s one of those problems that seems irreversibly bleak. World hunger can prompt not only despair, but a feeling of powerlessness, much the same way that wars, pandemics and any unpreventable deaths do. There’s a reason we think of these forces as “horsemen of the apocalypse,” and that reason is the sheer lack of control we seem to have over them, or the scale of death they cause.

But here’s the thing: we can totally fix world hunger. It’s not only possible, it frankly wouldn’t even be that hard. It wouldn’t take heretofore undiscovered science to address, it would barely even take international political action. It literally just takes money.

The price tag is more or less agreed upon, at least by the U.N. and leading nonprofits.

Before you read on, imagine something in your mind. How much money do you think it would take to solve world hunger altogether? I don’t mean the cost to feed every hungry person one to three meals today. I don’t mean fixing famine for a year. I mean addressing the root cause, and virtually ending starvation as a cause of death across the globe by ensuring sustainable access and infrastructure, while also paying for the food to keep people from starving to death as those systems are implemented.

Now imagine the sound of a drum roll. OK, now read on.

It’d take $40 billion a year. Not forever, just enough to total $267 billion by 2030, according to Gray Group International.

It’s … underwhelming, right?

Sure, $40 billion is more than I’ll ever see in one place. It’s probably more than any reader of this article will ever see in one place.

But when you consider a national government, or even an international corporation, and the operating budget they’re working with, $40 billion a year sounds indisputably doable.

I glanced the U.N. report with that estimate sometime in August of this year. Since then, I can’t help but notice things that cost more than that. What follows is a list of those things.

The website formerly known as Twitter

Admittedly, Elon Musk’s purchase of “X,” the website which was then called Twitter, for $44 billion was what brought most of these figures to my attention in the first place.

Musk famously got into a spat on the social media platform he now owns, with then U.N. World Food Programme Director David Beasley. Beasley said a one-time, $6 billion donation at the time would go a long way in fighting hunger that year. Musk declared “If (World Food Programme) can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it.”

Beasley did. Three days later, the U.N. released an explanation of how it could get one meal per day to a starving person for $0.43. For $6.6 billion, one could feasibly feed the 42 million people then on the brink of famine, for a year. It would be less than ideal, but it’d certainly help.

“$6 billion to help 42 million people that are literally going to die if we don’t reach them,” Beasley said in a news release shortly after that feud. “It’s not complicated.”

Musk did not follow up. The billionaire did donate $5.7 billion worth of Tesla shares to his own foundation a few weeks after that Twitter exchange, but it’s unclear how that money wound up being spent, and up for debate whether it was donated for a good cause, or because donating shares allowed him to dodge some taxes.

In any case, Musk’s ill-fated purchase of the website formerly known as Twitter in 2022 could have instead solved over a seventh of the hunger crisis. Seems like a good deal, but hey, hindsight’s 20/20, it happens, the past is the past, etc.

In any case, there are certainly people who could pay for this up front. A donation of $1 billion apiece from the richest 267 Americans would be no more than 25% of any of their net worth. That may seem like a lot, but like, c’mon. All of them would still have at least $3 billion apiece to get by on, which feels like a reasonable sum. If we draw from the list of richest people on Earth, rather than just Americans, nobody has to spend over an eighth of their net worth. Even better! Sure, some will have to liquidate a yacht or a house or a few cars to make it happen, but plenty could save up for a few years, sign a sheet of paper that says “put me down for $1 billion, deliverable by 2029” or whatever.

Any major international corporation could get in on the fun, too. Walmart made $573 billion in 2022. Can you imagine the positive press of donating 7% of that for a few years? Your PR team could basically take the rest of the decade off. The marketing team could juice the message for all it’s worth as well. For bonus points, you could drop a news release when you do it, challenging other corporations to beat your publicity stunt. Now, the competition either has to look less charitable than you, or help permanently solve world hunger. Either way, it’s a win.

Back to the billionaires, I feel like if I knew 25% or less of my net worth could solve all world hunger, everywhere, forever, full stop, I’d be in a pretty big hurry to sign that check. On a utilitarian level alone, I don’t think you could convince me that wasn’t worth it, and I’d certainly have less cash left than anyone with their name on the Forbes list.

Advertisements

Companies in the United States will spend an estimated total of $263 billion on digital advertising alone in 2023, according to eMarketer Research. The metric includes any ad that shows up on your smartphone, computer or iPad. Think website banners, YouTube spots, annoying videos that play in the corner of Wikipedia that you can pause but can’t close, for some reason, that kind of thing.

The total is $4 billion short of the whole, seven-year sum needed to eradicate starvation, spent in a single year.

Don’t get me wrong. If you have a product or service, you need to advertise it in order to grow and sustain your business. As dreamy as it would be to have all annoying ads disappear for a year, that probably wouldn’t be great for almost any business. Advertisements certainly help pay my bills, because they pay my employer’s bills, because my employer’s a newspaper.

And yet, digital advertising (which is distinct from TV, radio, or newspaper advertising, by the way,) is among the least effective methods of this age-old practice. One Harvard Business Review Article in 2021 reported that the effectiveness of Facebook advertising was overestimated by about 4,000% in common industry evaluations. New privacy laws in the EU have further limited online data-gathering since then, which means digital ad efficacy only goes downhill from here.

A large chunk of this money is being wasted, and one can’t help but wonder if it could be better-spent on something besides the next ad for RAID: Shadow Legends.

Military spending, by a country mile

The F-35 — which you may recognize as the plane that flew for two hours after its pilot ejected, before crashing in South Carolina last September — is the most sophisticated weapons platform ever conceived. It’s also the most expensive: a whopping $1.7 trillion has been spent on the program in the last 20 years. That’s 80% over it’s initially planned budget. Just a fun fact.

The latest contract signed by Uncle Sam for the aircraft, on a deal closed in January, arranges for 398 of these planes to be produced by 2026, according to Air & Space Forces Magazine. The cost to do so is about $30 billion.

Call me a hippy if you want, but it’s my opinion that 398 more of an established over-budget warplane with a defect list a mile long is, perhaps, a waste of taxpayer dollars. Even if that specific $30 billion purchase is justified, something clearly went awry in the program’s financial planning.

Even if you’re a fan of the F-35, look around. The DOD is rocking an $886 billion budget for FY 2023. It has not passed its last five audits. Any efficiency measure that saves at least 4.6% of the U.S. military budget would allow the United States to single-handedly foot the bill on solving world hunger over seven years at no extra cost. Get other countries involved (as the U.N. ideally would) and it would take even less.

Hell, as long as we’re considering the abilities of the United States federal government, you could even tax for it, if you were feeling brave. With 339.1 million people, enact a tax that nets an average of $120.51 per person (more for higher income, less for lower income, I won’t get into specifics) per year, for seven years, and bada-bing, world hunger is no more. I’ve seen bond referendums that do worse than that.

Or, take it to a global level. There are 8 billion people on the planet. Cut it down to 6 billion for a very rough estimate of the total who live in U.N. Member States and who are not currently facing starvation. If every country in the U.N. can get about $7 (USD) extra per capita out of their populations for the next seven years, we’re good to go. It would be unprecedented to send that kind of money to the multilateral group but hey, here’s to hoping.

First world stuff

Listen. There are worldly comforts in my everyday life that I don’t plan on giving up. I’m thinking the internet bill, gas for the car, the occasional vacation. Stuff like that.

There’s nothing wrong with having these comforts in life, and it’s not productive to feel guilty about the good luck of living in the first world. But there are also plenty of things, at least in my life that I could probably go without.

Statista suggests that Americans spent over $320 billion on fast food in 2022. In the same window, we spent $920 billion on domestic travel, $109 billion on luxury goods, and a little under $500 billion on consumer electronics.

Some of that was stuff people needed. A well-earned getaway with the family, a McDonald’s night because someone worked later than the grocery store was open, a nice engagement ring before popping the question, a new phone because the last one got dropped in the lake.

Some of it was not. There is, in fact, such a thing as an overindulgent vacation, too many fast food runs for a week, too much enthusiasm over the latest iPhone, etc.

There’s also an economic prisoner’s dilemma at play. Even if some people read this column and resolve to cut a third of their fashion budget, or a sixth of their fast food budget, or less than 10% of their yearly vacation budget (and donate the savings to UN’s World Food Program) that doesn’t mean the whole world will follow suit. Frankly, the whole world probably won’t.

But it still makes a difference. Again, the UN’s cost to prevent someone from starving to death is about $0.43 a day.

The math is very simple. You skip Burger King. Not forever, mind you, just once. You make some spaghetti with pork sausage and peas instead and keep the leftovers, saving you, let’s say, $20, if you’re dining for two. You send that $20 to WFP. It effectively keeps 46 people alive for a day, or one person alive for 46 days, or whatever ratio of people to days you find most persuasive. That’s a big difference. That’s an absolutely huge deal. And it’s so, so, remarkably achievable.

For an issue that threatens a tenth of the population, world hunger is remarkably fixable. It just takes money. That’s all there is to it. You can help with that.

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com