(Editor's Note: I am in Washington, DC this week for meetings and posted this item from the nation's capital).
A couple of weeks ago, my weekly column talked about the growing world food crisis and the United Nation's plea for $500 million in urgent aid to feed the world's poorest people. President Bush responded immediately with $200 million in humanitarian aid on behalf of the United States.
In that column I also mentioned the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provided Cornell University with a $26 million grant for genetic research to develop a resistant variety of wheat to prevent the Ug99 rust from devastating wheat crops worldwide. Wheat is 30 percent of the world's food supply and some activists oppose genetic modification of plants. Unlike corn and soybeans, wheat is believed to have little value as an energy crop. But wheat prices and shortages also have sparked protests most notably in Pakistan, the world's ally in the fight against terrorist encampments.
While high gas prices at the pump are big news around the country, including in our nation's capital, the price of food and the short supply of some commodities, such as rice, is front page news today in the Washington Post, the newspaper which draws the most attention on capitol hill and around the District of Columbia. And when banner headlines across the top of the Washington Post make the Sunday edition, you know it is important.
The problem could grow more acute as crops are converted from food to energy production and as countries, such as China, turn prime farmlands into factory sites, polluting more rivers and lakes, and drawing down groundwater supplies thus depleting life-critical aquifers.
In this month's National Geographic Magazine the vivid description of what is happening to farmlands along that country's Yellow River should concern everyone. As China's economy booms along at a 10 percent clip, it needs to buy more food, raw materials and oil. That increased demand is causing problems on the supply side and, as we all know too well, prices in the grocery store and at the service station keep going up.
The point is politicians who love to grill the oil company executives need to wake up and look at the who picture from energy supplies to food. They might find that in the quest for alternatives to eliminate fossil fuels that they are creating bigger shortages in more fundamental things that impact people's lives.....like food!
Don C. Brunell, President (DonB@awb.org)
