Since this administration takes its Bible so seriously, have someone tell them the dream about the thin cow and the fat cow. It worked in that story.

As this title, derived from Ha-Joon Chang's seminal book, "Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism" suggests, our current capitalist system is marred by special interests. The fact that a corporation like Monsanto can procure the funds to hire expensive lobby firms is ludicrous. There is absolutely no sense of democracy in such a procedure. Monsanto's power is akin to the fact that we invest billions into the research and development of drugs that treat erectile dysfunction, yet leave a relative pittance for developing drugs that treat tuberculosis, despite the fact that tuberculosis consistently devastates millions.
That said, Mr. Philpott has it right; we need decentralized agricultural production. We need to bring crop yield to the community level again. Cuba is a prime example of such a "reverse process" and has actually thrived with regards to crop yield and overall physical well-being. Let us learn from history and reshape how we approach our most vital resources.

I moved to a part of Thailand that produces a lot of food for export. We've had a good rainy season this year, which rice just loves. The rice fields are nice and green right now......... all those price shocks affecting everyone else..... I am buying rice from my father in law (a rice farmer) at a dollar a kilo. Have big sacks of it out back. My thanks for having purchased a second rice farm for him five years ago. Fresh chicken, eggs......... all cheap.

Have you ever noticed that with environmentalists, the sky is ALWAYS falling?

Monsanto has lied to the US and farmer's for decades now. They promised high yields with their current line of GMO seeds and the fact is that they DO NOT increase yields, only the amount of pesticides you can spray on them without harming the plant. Monsanto is not the answer and never was. If you really want to see what their business tactics are and how little they care about your or my health go to You Tube and search for "The World According to Monsanto" and wake up with nightmares like I did.

If you really want to help your food budget, grow your own garden. Anyone can do this regardless if you have a plot of land or not. Please use organically produced seeds if you can and enjoy the fruits of your labors. Self-sufficiency really feels good!

have either no land, no skills or no concept of how to garden their own food. They are already hard pressed by fuel prices and they aren't going to get a break from their landlords or mortgage companies. The middle class will be reduced to poverty and the poor will starve, turn to crime or riot.

This isn't going to go well.

Oh wait, that was pre-ordained before we were born, wasn't it?  

The system isn't going to come crashing down. There will be some pain, but it's not as if the world economy is suddenly going to implode. People are smarter and more creative in dealing with problems than environmentalist give them credit for.

environmentalists give them credit for. But our current crop of leaders around the world are almost bestial in their stupidity. No take that back. I have a higher respect for beasts. Let's just say it is not only the cream that rises to the top. It is also the used condoms, empty water bottles, and things we will not even mention. And they are the problem. It is a problem we have seen all the way from the thugs of Myanmar to Congress debating (ha!)the Climate Security Act. I mean we are damn lucky to still be around with these used condoms and empty pop bottles running things. To make matters worse, I think deep down they are profoundly suicidal and have every intention of taking us with them.

Damn! I got up on the wrong side of the bed again! Sorry, I have a rain barrel to buy. Hopefully that will put me in a better mood.

Randy Cunningham
Cleveland, OH

The problem as I see it, is that the people who will pay for these gross ag oversights and mistakes are not the same people as the ones making them. Our politicians, and most of us can simply shift our buying dollars from products to food if we have to. But the 850 million people in the world mentioned in the article? They don't have that luxury. It is easy for me to plant some extra crops in my organic garden and sing Kumbaya to myself - or move to Thailand and buys farms with American dollars and wait it all out. But what happens if you really care about what happens to those 850 million people?  Do any of us with our high speed internet and thousands of dollars of computer equipment really know what it feels like to hold a child as they slowly die of starvation? Listening to crying that goes on and on until you don't think you can bear the noise, and just then is slowly gets weaker and weaker and you'd give anything to hear that strong cry of a healthy unhappy child again? Now multiply that agony by 850 million.

This is not something we can ignore, even if our own future is safe and assured.

The problem is, people are breeding beyond their capacity to sustain those lives. I lived in East Africa for two years and this subject came up often. Ask a Somali why, in a place as dry and inhospitable as Somalia is, he or she would have 8 or 10 kids, and the answer was always "Well, some of them are going to die, and I need to have someone to take care of me in my old age." This has always been an issue in marginal places, but with the advent of modern medicine (particularly immunizations and antibiotics) and the historic ability to stave off famines by delivering food from a continent away, the problem is exponentially exacerbated.

So yes, in one way it is tragic, but in another it is inevitable. Let's say that the world weasels its way out of this current food AND oil crisis without any mass death. Those overpopulated zones are going to just keep breeding. The people living there are not going to say "Wow, that was a close one. We had better do something to get our population under control." Indeed in areas with Muslim populations they continue to breed because they are seeking superior demographics. They believe that larger population gives them more power - and they are seeking it.

So yes, given that I have friends in Somalia who are barely getting by even with my help, I just don't see how this problem can be resolved until the people who can not afford to have children stop doing so.

Today corn went for $8.07 on the CBT, soy for $15.65.  250 miles of the Mississippi is closed, so the reserve corn we have can't be shipped.  36,000 Iowans are newly homeless.  ADM and quaker cannot ship form Cedar Rapids because their rail bridge collapsed (with a traiin on it, by the way).

Farm land now sells over $6K an acre, and with several million acres under water, the remaining ones will likely be even MORE.

If we had a local/regional food system in place, this flood would still be a catastrophe, but it would only be a catastrophe for us, here;  Not for all of you in the rest of the world who rely on corn and soy from the midwest grown using $140/barrel oil from the mideast.  

Unsustainable.
Unsustainable.
Unsustainable.

So for we rich, sensitive types - the kind who have enough money to eat beef every meal, but try to be lighter on the land than that... what can we do? Even if I buy nothing but rice, canned beans, lentils, and local vegetables all summer, does that help the 850 million people who are starving?

Donate to world hunger relief charities? Lobby our congressmen (I haven't even got a lousy column!)? Ah, please won't someone just tell me what to do? :)

Mac -

This is exactly what a colleague in Rwanda has seen: small farmers who grow without expensive petroleum based inputs (herbicides, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizers) are doing well.

They're insulated in large degree from the current food and fuel crises, and they're actually finding new demand for their crops.  Some are actually scaling up more production, opening fields they haven't used in awhile, to meet demand.  This is putting more money in their pockets.

If there's a positive here, it's to show the wisdom in promoting, investing in, and buying local agriculture.  I mean, who wants tasteless strawberries in December anyway?!

John
Well, Rwanda disposed of much of its excess population in 1994. Might do the same again next decade too.

If you grow without herbicides or pesticides, your crop is very vulnerable to being wiped out. Don't fool yourself, nature is trying to kill you all the time.

Those same farmers you are talking about are a drought or a flood away from going hungary. You can't just "eat local" and sustain that. Eventual, the local conditions won't be sufficient. In places like Somalia, where life is always precarious because of a lack of water, a couple of bad years and it's over unless there is connections to food sources outside the region.

In my view, the issue is not how food is produced, it's overpopulation. There are too many people in parts of the world that can't sustain them.

Where do people, even editors at Gristmill, get their strange ideas from?

The reality is that "global food market" is very small. There are no "billions of people" depending on it. A few hundred thousand are.

95% of all produced rice is consumed locally. 85% of all produced maize (corn) and wheat is consumed locally.

Please, common, if you are writing about this type of sensitive topics, at least get the bottom basics right. You're making yourselves look like fools here really.

Mmm, another mistake.

75% of the 850 million people living in hunger are actually farmers and ruralites, not urbanites.

This is such basic knowledge from development economics... The fact that the author of this piece doesn't know this, says way too much.

............. 15% of millions of tons is a lot of wheat.

Same with rice. 5% of hundreds of millions of tons of rice produced in southeast Asia is still a lot of rice.

Percentages can sometimes be deceptive.

But you are absolutely correct in your notion that the people getting hammered by food shortages are subsistence farmers who just can't produce enough to subsist because of a shortage of land, shortage of water, etc. Subsistence farming has always been a lousy way to make a living. Most people who do it do so because they have to. Family farms that run at a real profit - those are rare things.

Please, common [sic], if you are writing about this type of sensitive topics, at least get the bottom basics right. You're making yourselves look like fools here really.

Um, citing numbers on the percentage of food consumed in the country of production without recognizing that what matters is the effects of changes in supply and demand on international prices looks pretty foolish to me. Yes, the transmission of prices from the world market to local markets is not perfect, especially in countries that have imposed export restrictions or are trying to keep down domestic prices through subsidies. But the global economy is becoming more and more integrated, and developments that affect commodities in one country do eventually affect prices and supplies elsewhere in the world.

Your persistent remarks on the alleged ignorance of the contributors here is poorly targeted. Moreover, you yourself have been caught out expressing personal views that you have tried to pass off as hard facts, or that are at least debatable.

Tom did not say "the majority of the 850 million people most at risk of hunger" lived in cities, he said "many of whom have been essentially evicted from productive farmland and pushed into cities over the past few decades." Many does not necessarily mean most. But he is right also about the general trend of rural-urban migration, and the wretched conditions facing the millions of people now living in urban slums.

Take the high road, Jonas, and cut the gratuitous personal attacks.

Why don't they stay on their "ancestral" lands and continue to farm? Could it be because for centuries that way of life was precarious? Could it be that they are looking for stable work and don't want to be dependent on the outcomes of the weather for their sustenance?

There are plenty of urban poor in Africa - there are MORE rural poor. A lot more. Go live and check it out. I found it most enlightening.

Food production techniques are NOT - NOT the problem. The green revolution ensured ample food. the problem is there are too many people. Third world people continue to breed in excess of what they can support. It's that simple.