> The "free market" solution

Free market agriculture has been far more successful at eliminating hunger than any other system.

Every country heavily subsidizes and protects their agriculture market.

There is no free market in agriculture.

World hunger has not been 'solved' and any success cannot simply be credited to 'free markets' for a such a large scale complex human social problem.

Hunger is a solved problem everywhere there is a free market.

It makes sense for countries to protect their domestic food production as a military asset - cutting off the food supply is a common warfare tactic. Subsidies also come about because of powerful agricultural lobbying interests. As to if subsidies reduce hunger, the evidence is scant to none. There is plenty of evidence, however, that they result in inefficient misallocation of resources, such as water.

Also, many subsidies in the US are in the form of price supports, and paying farmers to not farm. These are designed to increase costs to consumers, because the free market was allegedly too successful in reducing the price of food.

Check out the great American pig slaughter during the Depression:

https://livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe30s/crops_17.html

The subsidies are actually minuscule, compared to welfare spending and other transfer payments to the needy.

That's blatantly false. The US, Europe, China, Japan and every top agricultural nation subsidizes agriculture.

Subsidized agriculture has been responsible for pretty much ending hunger in most of the world. Free market agriculture hasn't been responsible for ending any hunger.

In the USA, welfare spending dwarfs farm subsidies by a factor of >50. No doubt this is true elsewhere, too. Private ownership of agriculture is what ended hunger. Its effect has been shown quite convincingly in Massachusetts and China.

> In the USA, welfare spending dwarfs farm subsidies by a factor of >50.

That depends on what you count as a "subsidy". Are all the roads, dams, diverting of rivers, etc counted as "subsidies"?

> Its effect has been shown quite convincingly in Massachusetts and China.

Modern subsidized agriculture in both countries has quite convincingly showed it.

Not sure why you are now moving the goalpost to welfare.

The US didn't always have agricultural subsidies. Hunger in the US was virtually eliminated before the Civil War. Agricultural subsidies did not happen until after WW1.

You could argue that government help in wiping out the natives and stealing their land and giving it to the white settlers is an agricultural subsidy. It's true that we've never had persistent hunger in the US. But that's cause we stole all the natives land. The natives however suffered tremendous hunger/starvation though.

> But that's cause we stole all the natives land.

Archaeological bone evidence of the pre-Columbian Indians is that they periodically had famines. Having land is not a sufficient condition for having a consistent, sufficient food supply.

The US, around 1800, was the first country in history to achieve a consistent food surplus.