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Comment by Reichhardt | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a straightforward way to kill a few hundred thousand people, particularly at a time when global wheat prices will be pushing poorer countries out of the market. I think I'd rather pay a little more at the grocery store and not have that on my conscience.

Populations in some countries are expanding infinitely. These countries should adapt now, by reducing family sizes and generally operating within resource limits based on national output and productivity. Losses of 100,000 today will be 100 million tomorrow.

Mali Population 1950: 4.7 million

Mali Population 2022: 21.4 million

Mali Population 2100: 80.3 million

https://www.populationpyramid.net/mali/2022/

UK Population 1950: 50.6 million

UK Population 2022: 68.5 million

UK Population 2100: 78 million

It is unrealistic to imagine that countries such as Mali will voluntarily adopt family planning or quickly reach a sub-replacement fertility rate. The only limit to their population growth is incoming food supplies. About a quarter of the population is already reliant on international aid.

Population growth is tied closely to privation: families have more children when they need more bodies to labor and produce resources for survival. Intentionally starving entire countries because of some misinformed attempt at Malthusianism has the opposite of the intended effect. And that's even before we consider how disgustingly callous it is.

The childhood mortality rate in Mali has fallen from 37% in 1970 to 9% in 2020. The fertility in the same period fell only from 7.13 to 5.78.

The number of surviving children has thus increased from 4.49 to 5.25, thanks to medical advances and international aid.

As we donate aid and food, the population will continually increase until either our generosity is exhausted or some other environmental limit is hit.

Mali has 37% of its population without access to contraception. We should be donating education, contraception and abortion for women, not food aid.

This is again missing the big picture: the single easiest way to ensure that Mali's birthrate goes up instead of down is to make it as economically advantageous as possible to have large families. Famines tend to do that.

Talking about it in terms of ratios masks the actual material conditions we're talking about: withholding food would mean hundreds of thousands of pointless deaths; pointless because it undermines the actual macro trend we're seeing of rapidly falling birth rates. Infant mortality is a red herring: it's fallen faster than birth rates in every country that has undergone a development shift because it's the bellwether for the latter.

I've heard the argument from the other end from time to time, that Western food aid is bad because it distorts markets for food producers in the destination country (by making local farmers unable to stay in business). But I think this is the first time I've heard it argued that it's affecting prices in the West in a significant way.

> Male Patriarchs in Sub-Saharan Africa who father 6 children

When international policy preferences (especially ones that will result in mass death) are justified with highly specific examples that appear to be described with careful word choice to achieve a particular emotional response, I check for my wallet.

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