I disagree, food subsidies are the only alternative to the granary system, or foolishly counting on food imports. Agriculture is an industry with notorious slim margins, but yield can vary up to 30% year to year just on random weather patterns and often effects large areas at once. Combined those are a recipe for an eventual shortage unless you pay to over produce. A farm running on 2% margins on a good year can't risk planting 10% extra if they might not be able to sell it and will take it all as a loss, and so farmers without decent subsidies would only try to produce up to the current demand and not a bushel over it. And if a large agricultural area experiences a bad year, as we have seen happen historically many times over, and everyone was already only planning to barely meet demand, all of a sudden you have a food shortage and people starve. And on top of that weather patterns across the globe are changing and becoming less predictable. Famines essentially became nonexistent in places with decent crop subsidization, but in places without it that still rely on large granary stores shortages still happen.