‘We are dying slowly:’ Palestinians are eating grass and drinking polluted water as famine looms across Gaza

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‘We are dying slowly.’ Children go to bed hungry and parents scavenge for food as famine looms in Gaza | CNN
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These animal farmers are making famines worse by driving up demand for cropland and input allocation towards feed crops. The more money is shoved into the animal farming industry, the more famine there will be in the world.

edit: if you feed food to food, you're wasting food. This isn't some obscure fact. The free market on inputs and even on land allocates the resources to who pays more - and subsidies allow the animal industry to pay more, to buy more land, to buy more inputs.

The future is plant-based. Anyone who doesn't want people to die of hunger agrees with this.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1713820115

Global farmers facing fertiliser sticker shock may cut use, raising food security risks https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/global-farmers-facing-fertiliser-sticker-shock-may-cut-use-raising-food-security-2021-12-09/

Yeah, I don't think that's actually the main reason the people of Gaza are starving right now.

Indeed, current famine is mostly due to war.

But food poverty, people skirting the edge of hunger, are affected by this.

We saw this when Putin invaded Ukraine and ruined the massive export of grains to developing countries and aid agencies.

And, indirectly, these animal farmers are making food crops less attractive, thus leading to less production of food crops, which means less food to give to aid agencies (assuming that the aid can reach those who need it).

Sorry, I apparently wasn't being direct enough, let me try again; it's gross to use the starvation of Palestinian civilians, caused by an illegal blockade on humanitarian supplies, as a springboard for vegan talking points, and you should be embarrassed that you just did that.

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We get it, you're a vegan. Now, just for one second, try to not be self-centred and ask yourself whether, if you were in Gaza right now, and all you had was a thick, juicy, steak, you would eat it.

The answer is yes. If your answer is "no" then you don't understand the situation there, you don't understand hunger, try again until you do.

Mate, read the room. Tone deaf posts like this are a good reason why people hate vegans. And this is coming from a fellow vegan. Palestine isn't going to avoid famine by switching to vegan now; that's completely insane! And it would still be starving even it was 100% vegan, due to, you know, a fucking genocide happening.

Thank you, Mr. Tone Policeman

You're welcome, but it was mostly about a shit argument, not as much about tone.

The first problem is that I posted the comment on the wrong thread. There was a different one next to it about farm business owner protests in the EU.

The second problem is that nobody noticed that the quote in my comment isn't from this article about Gaza, which means that none of the people who replied to me read the article.

WTF are you even talking about? Your comment I answered to was this, which contains no quotes.

The only problem here is that you made a dumb mistake, refuse to own up to it and move on, and instead insist that everyone else is talking out of their arse.

Edit: fixed link to comment

Hey, uh, this is awkward but you linked my post? I totally agree though, this VeganPizza guy picked the wrong thread for this stuff.

You're right. I fixed it now but it seems that all the links next to the comment are broken in this thread, for me at least. The links next to the name point to different comments in the thread. Maybe a Lemmy bug

Animal farmers are much more likely to prevent this specific famine - when you're displaced from your home, there is no chance you'll harvest and bring your crops. There is a chance you can bring some animals with you.

I understand your point, but there's a time and place for that, and that is absolutely not here.

This is the time, any later and it's too late.

Stop pretending you are the voice of reason when really you're just selfish and lazy.

You, personally, are a net negative voice for this movement. If you never spoke of veganism again, you'd have a more positive impact than if you continue what you're doing. The way you're acting is responsible for the deaths of more animals than you're preventing.

Genuinely amazing how commited you are as to lying to yourself. Pretend that I'm the problem. Wow. I don't care if I change your mind, I have very little doubt about that. I've tried, but I'm still allowed my platform the same way you are, or don't you believe in free speech?

Yeah, I can see how you're trying - even if I wanted to, I couldn't pretend to be a worse activist than you are. But sure, keep killing those innocents with your cowardly behaviour - after all, you have FREE SPEECH! And those darn innocents, who are they to tell you what to say and not say?

One day you'll realise how shitty a human you are, choosing to eat our only companions in this universe.

You, personally, are responsible for more animal deaths than I could ever be. You're either incredibly stupid, or you know how ineffective and negative your activism is, yet you choose to still pursue it because it makes you feel good to think of yourself as better than others. You could also just be an incredibly evil person, but you don't seem like you' have the mental capacity for that.

You're not doing this for animals or humans. You're doing this for yourself, despite all the innocent animals you're responsible for murdering through your misguided activism.

Wow lie more to yourself. Your accusations and denials mean nothing to me.

Now is the time. You sound like the people who complain about calls for gun laws after mass shootings.

Dude, there is no food shortage due to too much animal farming in this conflict. There is food shortage because one state is trying to genocide the people of another state. Even if all of Palestine and the whole world were fully vegan, Gazans wouldn't have more to eat.

Please explain to me how your point is in any way applicable. You are literally making vegans look stupid, and I'm saying that as someone who is trying to move closer and closer towards veganism. Imagine you posted this under a news article regarding a school shooting - would you think that's the right place and time to post this, even if the time is now?

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Yeah but there's enough calories to do this right on the other side of the Israeli Gaza border. The Israeli's could end this, right now.

The problem is not a lack of food. The problem is a lack of logistics to get the food to the people. And the cause of the problem is not farmers. It is the regions most powerful military activly blocking aid. Soon it will also be because the government of said country successfully lobbied to defund the aid organization with established networks with Gaza.

The solution is simple. Don't activly block food from Gaza, and food will appear in Gaza. Almost like magic. If magic was the result of decades of hard work in building a new world order after world war 2.

Feel free to educate me if I am wrong, but I vaguely remember reading somewhere that famine happens due to lack of logistics rather than lack of limited food in the world. I still think future is plant based for other reasons(emissions, cost, etc) but is the solution to famines producing more food or providing more logistics? Or maybe a combination of both?

This sounds like a passage from Das Kapital where Marx talks about famine in India. What was true in 18** isn't necessarily true today, and I suspect that producers wanting to drive up prices is a bigger challenge than transport today

Currently, with the industrial fossil-fuel food regime, food insecurity (up to famine) happens:

  • due to markets pricing out poor people (doesn't matter if there's food around if you can't buy it)
  • war - destroying food growing capacity, killing or scaring away the agriculture workers, stealing harvests, or just preventing harvest seasons
  • blockades, usually part of war, which is what you see in Gaza
  • local production failure due to various reasons like: weather catastrophes, drought, epidemics, floods, but also economic failures such as the fail to buy inputs by the time they're needed, such as not being able to buy fertilizers because they got much more expensive to import (because production decreased and/or demand increased such as subsidized demand from rich countries)

As the climate gets more chaotic, drought, weather disasters, diseases and pests are going to become major factors in this food security state. The other aspect are inputs, especially fertilizers, which depend on fossil fuels which are both running low (getting expensive) AND must be replaced with something that isn't destroying the planet's climate. This is called a predicament.

In any sane society, resources that are scarce would be rationed according to need. And that means using cropland and inputs for food for humans. This is both for dealing with food insecurity and for mitigating climate heating.

I appreciated the info. I agree too! The circle v thing in your profile name is cool.

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