Food aid outsourced to Amazon

The truth is, there’s more than enough food in the world, it’s just unevenly distributed. And the biggest problem, when it comes to ensuring that no one is starving or undernourished, is distribution – getting the food that’s needed to the people that need it. Efficiently.

Besides conflict and geopolitical tensions, food shortages are mostly caused by the vagaries of the weather and forces of nature, like floods and fires, though policies and incentives can have a major impact. Like when Sri Lanka banned chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Supply and demand are constantly shifting variables.

And that’s where Amazon excels. Not only do they have the world’s most efficient systems for physical logistics, their in-house data analytics and intelligent systems make them masters of predictive modelling. They know you want or need something almost before you do. With the ability to include real-time satellite imagery of crops and stockpiles, global food becomes just another data problem to be solved.

“To be honest, we spend far too much, even with volunteers, trying to deal with the food problem,” said World Food’s chief communicator. “Outsourcing to Amazon for forward planning and logistics has boosted our mission by orders of magnitude. It’s the best move we’ve made.”

We live in a globalized world, like it or not, and orchestrating global systems like satellites, submarine cables, distributed data and logistics centers, and trade and freight routes, is no trivial task. But it’s vital if we are ever going to achieve the goal of eradicating hunger.

Outsourcing it to the experts delivers the goods.