Melting Pot Mind

Missing Links: The Global Food Fight

Nutshell:

“The poor are not only being hurt by the food crisis more than anyone else, but they are also being blamed for it. U.S. President George W. Bush, for example, noted that when poor countries like India prosper, people there “start demanding better nutrition and better food.” Therefore, he said, “demand is high, and that causes the price to go up.”

“But the most important catalysts of the current food crisis are government policies—especially in the United States—that encourage farmers to divert their production away from crops for human consumption and toward ethanol and other biofuels. Recent studies point out that these government decisions are responsible for more than 50 percent of the recent increase in food prices and will account for more than 33 percent of food inflation in the next decade.”

“In any case, at least we now know that the culprits of the higher food prices are not consumers in poor countries but farmers in rich ones—and the politicians they have in their pockets.”