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Food Crisis
Reading about the worldwide food crisis makes me thankful that I've never had to worry about the price of food. There was maybe a two week stretch in college when I was living off campus flat broke, buying turkey and bread with nickels and dimes. Really though, food has never been a problem living as a middle class American. This crisis is said to have started at the end of 2007 and I'm just reading about it now. That's how isolated from hunger the American people are.

The most pressing problem the world faces is obviously starvation. So much of what I've read about the problem indicates that the interdependence of the world economy is causing this crisis to snowball. My thought is what happens to worldwide economic production when more and more people have to worry about feeding themselves? I don't think it'll hit me much at all. Just thinking about it though makes one nervous.

Tyler Cowen places blame on the lack of free trade in the food commodities market. This is consistent with what I've read in the past about world hunger. My understanding is that there is plenty of food in the world and that governments are the biggest impediment to getting it to people. Tim at Balloon Juice puts the blame on oil, ethanol and climate change. It's good to see that corn ethanol is getting some of the blame for this. Every person I talk to - even people I hear talking on the street - realizes that corn ethanol is a terrible idea. That's a good thing. This could be the first major crisis where climate change affects the western world.

 
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