A friend tipped me off to a small story from last month’s New York Times: “World Food Supply Is Shrinking, U.N. Agency Warns”

You’d think it would be front page news, but it was buried in the section C. Food prices are spiking, especially for the world’s poorest people. Global warming is causing crops to fail and it’s expensive to ship food to areas remote from the infrastructure grid. The rising cost of oil exacerbates this because 1) it costs more to ship to those remote areas and 2) land is being removed from agricultural production to grow biofuel crops. Also, as China and India industrialize, their citizens want to eat meat like the westerners, and so grain that once fed the hungry poor now goes to feed the animals that feed the rich.

What the Times won’t mention is that gloablization of trade plays a role in this, displacing local agriculture with cheap food imports – until the cheap imports are no longer cheap and there’s no more local agriculture.

The article quotes Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World Food Program as saying some poor people will be “priced out of the food market.”

The day you can’t feed your family is the day rebellion is made legal.