The idea behind famine relief is not "to put still more land under cultivation and send the surplus into so-called Third World areas" and moreover, these famines are not occurring where "population is already exceeding its carrying capacity."
I assume you are talking primarily about Africa where famines have been more frequent than elsewhere in recent decades.
On the first issue, you don't seem to understand the difference between famine relief and development assistance. The policy to prevent famine and reduce hunger adopted by most of the international community is not just short term food distribution through famine relief -- it's development assistance, ie, enhancing the capacity of poor countries to produce food for themselves and more equal distribution of the capacity to purchase food by the poor.
In eastern and southern Africa, that means helping African farmers make investments in agriculture, such as irrigation, improved seeds, fertilizer, better fallows, better market information, improved roads and improved storage. During periodic crises, the policy is to provide food aid to tide people over until conditions improve. Most development experts emphasize acquiring that food from within Africa, but as one poster has pointed out, farm lobbies in developed countries do use food relief as a means of marketing first world surpluses. But famine relief is a tiny, short term part of development assistance.
Your second false premise is that these countries are at their carrying capacity. I don't know why you persist in this false belief despite the many times others have tried to correct your false views with facts.
The primary natural cause of famine in Africa is not scarcity of land. It is irregular rains. (As another poster pointed out, natural causes precipitate famines, but the ultimate causes are entirely man made.) The main difference between agriculture in Africa and the agricultural regions of almost every continent is that
African agriculture is rain fed. That means if there are no rains, there is no crop. That is also why, if African countries can make investments in water storage and irrigation it is expected that famines will cease.
If you travel by car across South Africa and Botswana (as I have) the single most remarkable feature of both countries agriculture is their control of water. Travelling west from the Johannesburg-Pretoria region to Botswana, whether you take the low veld route or highveld route you will come across dams -- giant dams public works like Hartebeestpoort dam, private football field sized dams, and even swimming pool size dams. Dams dot the South African countryside and a very significant portion of total rainfall runoff is captured. South Africa relies on rains, but can produce food whether the rains are good or not; it has excellent irrigation. Botswana is much drier and does not have enough consistent rains for rain fed agriculture, nor for dams to be useful; but because of the unique geography of southern Africa, whereby much of the rains that percolate down into South Africa run west underground in massive acquifers to Botswana. Botswana is dotted with wind-driven boreholes and water tanks the way South Africa is dotted with little dams. That's why such a dry country as Botswana nevertheless has massive cattle herds, using its semi-desert savannah areas to produce massive amounts of meat.
That's the kind of investment that eastern and southern African countries, including Ethiopia, ultimately want to create. They have no shortage of land; they have a shortage of investment.
The only African countries that can be said to have real land shortage issues for their farmers -- as opposed to man made land tenure and maldistribution problems -- are Rwanda, Burundi and Malawi. But even these countries could with investment increase output and none of the three has experienced famine.
Rather than stick to your counterfactual fantasies about the causes of famine, why not read this interesting article that recently appeared in the Christian Science Monitor. It shows some of the hurdles faced by Ethiopian farmers that keep them poor and hence vulnerable to famine when the rains fail -- for example, the excessive number of middle men who take most of the price of grain as it moves from the farm to the city:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0223/p01s04-woaf.htmlMarket approach recasts often-hungry Ethiopia as potential bread basket
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA - Imagine if Ethiopia, that land of skin-and-bone children that defined African famine in the 1980s, could turn from the world's largest recipient of food aid into a bread basket, not only feeding itself, but its neighbors also.
It could happen...
Ethiopia is the second-largest maize producer in Africa, and yet Ethiopian farmers are getting poorer and poorer," says Ms. Gabre-Madhin, the head of Ethiopia's soon-to-be-functioning commodities exchange. "We're going to have to do something very dramatically different. The stakes are high."
There are 10 million farmers in Ethiopia, a country of 80 million, growing mostly cereals such as wheat, maize, sorghum, barley, sesame, and an Ethiopian grain called "teff." Yet, few farmers travel more than 12 miles from their homes in their lifetimes, so they have very little information about what their food would be worth if they did decide to sell it. When they do sell, they sell to a local trader, who then sells to another trader, and another, adding cost to the food when it finally reaches the consumer in large cities like the capital, Addis Ababa.
"The farmer doesn't know the price – he might get five cents here, but on the other side of the country, where there's a drought, he might get three times the price," says Gabre-Madhin. "So let's imagine the farmer goes to a warehouse where you have constant updates with the latest market prices. Now the farmer starts thinking nationally, not locally."
<end quote>
The article also discusses how purchasers cannot purchase grain directly from farmers because quality varies so much. Overall the system is chaotic, and rife with market failure.
Just consider the effect that cheap, foot powered, Chinese style threshing machines would have. Many African peasants thresh their grain by having their cattle trample it, then throwing it in the air for the wind to blow away the chaff. This means the grain is damaged, dirty, and disfavored by local urban consumers; a huge amount is wasted or lost. Threshing machines alone would increase effective yields drastically.
Consider storage. Olga Linares de Sapir, in her article "Agriculture and Diola Society," describes a community in southern Senegal that produces surpluses of both rice and peanuts almost every year. They store their surplus rice over their cooking huts so that the smoke discourages vermin like rats, mice and insects. But after two or more years, the stored rice has an unpleasant smokey flavor. The Diola therefore have developed a pattern of competitive giving away of old rice. Part of the article is quite humorous because this "old rice" is treated much the way north Americans treat Christmas fruit cake. If the Diola had modern storage facilities, markets and bank accounts they could accumlulate their surpluse rice or sell it and store the value of their supluses instead.
Once again, I would urge you to abandon your false, make-believe ideas of why famines occur or what the international community is trying to do to prevent them. Once you understand why Africans are poor and why some countries experience periodic famine, you will abandon the notion that withholding food aid during periodic famines is appropriate, and understand that such a policy is nothing but cruel and pointless, and accomplishes nothing other than death and destruction.
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