Increased demands threaten to keep food from the hungry of the world

Gardening is a completely different experience when you really don't need the food. In fact, the same thing could be said about free markets, biofuels, emerging economies and global warming. How you feel about them depends almost entirely on how much you need the food.

If we don't need the food, our ears work differently. To paraphrase Thomas Fuller, the guy who doesn't need food isn't prepared to hear anything from the guy who does. But that needs to change because the guys who need the food are telling us something to we really need to listen carefully.

Although there are conflicting statistics, in the last year the price of all food, and especially wheat, rice, and edible oils, has skyrocketed. Part of this is due to prosperity. As India and China raise their standards of living, their citizens have been consuming more meat. Since producing a pound of meat can require seven pounds of grain and even more water than it takes to grow that grain, that tends to multiply the impact of India's and China's already large populations on the food system.

Also, the explosive growth of China's cities, plus the degradation of the environmental quality of its land and water, have lowered the amount of arable land to the point that China will be forced to rent or purchase crop land in the Americas or anywhere it can.

Complicating this, although it is not the major factor, is the foolish diversion of a large fraction of the American corn crop, and a lot of the developed world's oil seed, into automotive fuel. This saves virtually no energy, and the subsidies that make it possible distort markets everywhere, especially in the third world. It would be far better to drop the tariff on Brazilian ethanol, made much more efficiently from sugar cane, and let Brazil bring unused savanna into production.

In fact, various governments' meddling in food markets has caused much of this problem. Farmers cannot afford to invest in increasingly expensive fertilizers where food prices are controlled, and subsidies to consumers merely drive up prices where they are not. Also, government controls on food exports, essentially hoarding, and financial speculation in present and future crops has disrupted the free flow upon which the market in food products has come to depend.

America's occupation of Iraq adds an unknown amount to the cost of oil, perhaps $40 a barrel, and it's growing indebtedness lowers the value of the dollar. Both have increased the cost of everything. But it is the growing prevalence of drought, especially in Australia, and extreme weather elsewhere that really threatens our ability to feed the earth's already excessive population. Drought once drove mankind to the brink of extinction, and it is fully capable of reducing the earth's population to the number of people who occupied it in the late 19th century.

As always, the answers to these problems are known, should we ever come to understand how urgently they need to be solved. As Steinbeck wrote. "In the eyes of the people there is failure, and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath.'' A world without food is a world without hope, and a world without hope is a world without fear.

And that is a very dangerous place.

Bill Mego's column is published each Thursday. Contact him at bill.mego@sbcglobal.net.