According to the 1973 movie “Soylent Green,” in 2022 — only five years from now — overpopulation will result in a worldwide food shortage causing most people to live on the fictional Soylent Company’s highly engineered food produced from vegetables (Soylent Green and Soylent Yellow). Then a mysterious, protein-rich substance is used to make Soylent Red. Spoiler alert: it’s dead people.

It doesn’t look like we’ll hit that 2022 threshold, but a significant part of the developing world is starving to death.

As Catholics we react but face the questions of how, where, for whom? If we accept the mission statement of Catholic Charities to treat people with compassion, dignity and respect, we must do so in a way that helps others achieve self-sufficiency. So when faced with famine in countries outside the United States, what’s the best strategy?

1. Vet. All agencies are not created equal. Be comfortable with the ones you choose.

2. Contribute. It may feel good to organize a food drive to the extreme of booking semis, rail cars, and ships. But the cost of such endeavors and the effectiveness of refrigerating, transporting, loading and unloading, skimming, facing storms and other weather conditions, and bribing officials, significantly reduces the amount of food ultimately available for delivery and fit for eating.

The food chain is:

• Buy the seed

• Plant the crops

• Irrigate, fertilize, control weeds and pests

• Harvest

• Package — maybe refrigerate — and prepare for shipment

• Transport by truck, rail, ship, truck, rail, and truck again

• Unpackage and prepare for local delivery

• Sell / barter / deliver

• Use, irrespective of compatibility with culture, religious belief, or health.

3. Verify. Did all of the steps in number two actually occur? Who was in charge? Who delivered? What was skimmed? What was the short- and long-term effectiveness?

A simple enough formula, especially in the age of the internet that provides a lot of raw data and a lot of misinformation.

The moral: donate to reputable organizations that deal in monetary contributions up to the point of market-ready production and distribution. This reduces corruption opportunities at every part of the supply chain, and encourages local control of farming.

Monetary contributions to proven charities also reduce the use of food as a weapon of control over a receiving country or an instrument of foreign policy of a donor country.

So, write a check to a vetted charity that will account for its collections and disbursements. It may seem ordinary and somewhat mercenary, but the effect of providing the tools for farming and local transportation of produce will have greater and more positive long-term effects for citizens of developing countries.

As President Franklin Roosevelt once observed, “People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”

This world doesn’t need more of those.