This article appeared today on the EarthWeek website. If you haven't visited there you should check it out. They report weekly, updated on Fridays, on environmental and health events from the previous week. Earthquakes, volcanos, hurricanes, plants, animals, epidemics etc. Interesting stuff, presented in a factual way. No preaching.

Food riots in several poor nations during the past month have U.N. and other officials arguing that the growing diversion of grain harvest from food to ethanol fuel is causing a global food crisis.

"The reality is that people are dying already," said Jacques Diouf, of the Food and Agriculture Organization.

Last week, the U.N. predicted "massacres" unless the biofuel policy is halted.

"The world food situation is very serious. We have seen riots in Egypt, Cameroon, Haiti and Burkina Faso," said Diouf. "There is a risk that this unrest will spread in countries where 50 percent to 60 percent of income goes to food."

Global food prices have jumped 83 percent over the past three years as the worlds main agricultural producers shifted their focus to biofuels.

Indian Finance Minister P. Chidambaram has called on industrial nations to cut off all subsidies for such alternative energy production, and to focus on providing food to the developing world.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund, says a growing number of government ministers have labeled the impact of biofuels as a "crisis of humanity."

U.N. statistics say that the amount of corn it takes to produce 11 gallons of ethanol can feed a child for an entire year.

We have the fuel crisis on one hand with gasoline predicted to go up to $4 by summer. We depend on the Middle East (mostly people who do not love or admire us) for huge amounts of the oil we need. How do we ignore that?

And we have people starving in places all over the world because fields once used to feed them are now being used to grow fuel. How do we ignore starving multitudes?

Is the US still the "Breadbasket of the World" as they used to call us when I was a child? Should we be? Can we be?

It seems that it's easy to say countries should feed their own people but that's never been the case. We export food but we also import it. So do all the major developed countries. Less affluent countries do more importing than exporting, but I bet the numbers (in pounds) is relatively small. I guess I really don't know how the numbers compare.

Many of my relatives are farmers in North Dakota. They aren't terribly affluent but they get by and always have enough to eat. Some years they struggle, of course, when the crops are bad or the weather takes out a couple fields or a large piece of equipment needs to be replaced (WAY more expensive than a car!). They try to guess the market each year and grow whatever will be right for the soil that year (they rotate) but also whatever will bring them the best return on their investment. How do we tell hard-working farmers NOT to crow biofuel corn this year because people are starving in a country they will never visit? Especially when they are pouring $3+ gasoline into their tractors?

We used to worry about a nuclear crisis.

Then we worried about a fuel crisis.

But the real world-changing tragedy is a food crisis.

For many, it's here already.

Kate