Hunger: handouts

At Roxann's suggestion (since I was out of ideas tonight):

Why is handing out food (usually) a bad idea?

Think about a local economy for a moment. Can you make a living from selling something that other people are giving away? Not unless you have higher quality that people are willing and able to pay for. That's the idea behind price wars, right? People pay the higher price when they'll get more for their money; otherwise, they pick the lowest price.

Now think about a situation where money is not abundant. People have to be able to pay the higher price to get the better quality and keep you in business. If they can't afford that extra, even if it's a very small amount, they'll take the free product. They have to.

Now you can't sell your product. Do you keep producing? No, you find another job and get your product for free like everyone else. That's only sensible.

OK, put this in an agricultural setting: you produce food staples, but an outside agency is giving them away (or their equivalent, like rice instead of corn). You stop producing rice because you can get corn for free and no-one will buy your rice. Now no-one produces rice in your area, you look for other work. Of course, if you live in a typical rice-producing region, there isn't much other work to do. So you become unemployed, but you still get your free corn.

If you're the outside agency, you were giving away corn because there was a food shortage. Now, the food shortage has grown. Plus, all the people who used to produce food are sitting around with nothing to do and are slowly losing their sense of self-worth because of it. Does that sound like a dangerous situation to anyone else?

I said that handing out food is usually a bad idea, but of course, there are exceptions. Famines happen, and when they do it's important to provide food. There are ways of making it less damaging, however -- food for work is probably the best example. Your food donation isn't given to people who can work unless they do something to improve their communities. Win-win!