2008: the year millions starve to death?

One thing I really need to write more about is the world food crisis. It is quite striking how this has exploded into the media over the last two months, and I expect it to become a bigger story as food prices continue to rise and increasing numbers of people across the world become unable to feed themselves and their families. I want to write more about this, not so much because any insights I have into the issue are likely to be that fascinating, but more because what I have written so far about it has been pretty facile. Biofuel is definitely not helping the situation, but it is rather simplistic to say that the turning over of relatively small tracts of land to ethanol production is the cause of recent steep rises in world food prices.