Askileon and Giask have both suffered starvation as a direct result of lords being lazy. This stopped being a regular occurrence only after I put forward immense effort to see these lords punished, but so far as I can tell, they (and most of LN's other lords) still don't want to be responsible for selling food, and the same is true in BoM.
Because the question about the scope of this problem has come up, it's worth pointing out that the personal examples being presented are done so largely for the ease with which they can be related to the overall problem. One of the side-effects of working on the dev team is the "30,000 foot" view you get of the game. It reinforces just how similar realms are across continents, and how there are quite a few problems endemic to everywhere. Maybe not all the time, but they do pop up.
