Yep, it's happening. Even the World Bank sez so. Food prices have shot up 83 percent in the past three years. In Bangladesh, a 2kg bag of rice takes up half of a family's daily income; in Yemen, a quarter of incomes are going to fund...bread. Egypt is seeing riots over the cost of food, as is Haiti, and Burkina Faso is now gripped by a general strike.The humanitarian costs of this will, of course, be immense. But so will the costs in stability. Resource deprivation leads to war, tribal conflict, and a whole lot of other generalized nastiness, both as groups try to expropriate food and as politicians look for someone to blame. So we may be in for a bumpy ride here. And why? Well, in part, demand for biofuels like ethanol is driving up the price of corn. Global drought is decimating the production of wheat, and the move towards meat-based diets is requiring a whole lot more grain in order to feed cattle. And beyond all that, simple development is playing a role. As the Indian commerce minister says in the linked article, "going from one meal a day to two meals a day for 300 million people increases demand a lot." I don't know what the solutions are, but this is certainly the sort of thing where the US could take the lead in coordinating global aid, and a massive infusion of cash would be rather welcome. Plugging the hole in the UN World Food program, for instance, would cost about $500 million, approximately 1/196th the price tag of Bush's latest request for Iraq funding. ASSIGNMENT DESK: GLOBAL FOOD CRISIS.
Yep, it's happening. Even the World Bank sez so. Food prices have shot up 83 percent in the past three years. In Bangladesh, a 2kg bag of rice takes up half of a family's daily income; in Yemen, a quarter of incomes are going to fund...bread. Egypt is seeing riots over the cost of food, as is Haiti, and Burkina Faso is now gripped by a general strike.The humanitarian costs of this will, of course, be immense. But so will the costs in stability. Resource deprivation leads to war, tribal conflict, and a whole lot of other generalized nastiness, both as groups try to expropriate food and as politicians look for someone to blame. So we may be in for a bumpy ride here. And why? Well, in part, demand for biofuels like ethanol is driving up the price of corn. Global drought is decimating the production of wheat, and the move towards meat-based diets is requiring a whole lot more grain in order to feed cattle. And beyond all that, simple development is playing a role. As the Indian commerce minister says in the linked article, "going from one meal a day to two meals a day for 300 million people increases demand a lot." I don't know what the solutions are, but this is certainly the sort of thing where the US could take the lead in coordinating global aid, and a massive infusion of cash would be rather welcome. Plugging the hole in the UN World Food program, for instance, would cost about $500 million, approximately 1/196th the price tag of Bush's latest request for Iraq funding. 
