Billions are already starving. You just never hear about them. Millions are starving today on American streets. Yet we do nothing but sit on our hands, play hot potato between generations, point fingers, start culture wars, start class wars.
It’s all quite boring. Nobody is interested in solving the issue. Only a rat race to see who can con the next person(s).
Some days this monologue from Westworld rings true:
“ I think humanity is a thin layer of bacteria on a ball of mud hurtling through the void. I think if there was a God, he would’ve given up on us long ago. He gave us a paradise and we used everything up. We dug up every ounce of energy and burned it. We consume and excrete, use and destroy. Then we sit here on a neat little pile of ashes, having squeezed anything of value out of this planet, and we ask ourselves, “Why are we here?” You want to know what I think your purpose is? It’s obvious. You’re here along with the rest of us to speed the entropic death of this planet. To service the chaos. We’re maggots eating a corpse”
Millions of Americans suffer from "food insecurity" i.e. "reduced food intake and disrupted eating patterns at some time during the year." [1] This is very bad, but, there are also food stamps, soup kitchens, food banks, school lunches, family members, and random good samaritans that prevent actual famine amongst those populations because there is no shortages of food present. This is very distinct from real mass starvation where millions of people are dying of hunger in a famine where there is insufficient food available which is what I believe the GP is referring to.
The battle is already lost if we can only feed the people Alice today through a global, centralized food industry.
Such a system is doomed to fail eventually, there's no way around it. Not to mention the fact that its just a big shell game with everyone trying to hide the true external costs of industrial agriculture. The larger we build that system the harder it will fall unfortunately, and if there are no local food producers left in business we're all screwed like the Soviets after they realized killing all the people who knew how to farm was a bad idea if you also like to eat.
Food. Fuel.
Renewables is shifting one of these, but the other will not go backwards, its that or billions will starve.