All of human history is about the going from sudden fat years to the sudden lean years. We've always had good times and bad, and we've had ways of managing the bad times. We have ways of insulating ourselves, making ourselves less sensitive for the bad times by having things like grain stores, for example. Pretty much every civilization that's lasted for any reasonable length of time has some food management principles behind it. But what's been happening over the past thirty years is it's failed - the insurance policy.

We have the industrial agriculturalists who try and make an argument that big is beautiful. But if you do the math, and particularly if you factor in that the price of oil is going to go through the roof, and so the price of transportation is going to go through the roof - making it abundantly clear that it's out of whack. The efficiency arguments are already crumbling, particularly if you actually include the cost of food pollution that these industries cause. They are tremendously unsustainable and tremendously inefficient.

I definitely think the price of food is going up. We need to figure out ways to manage that in a sustainable way. We have to figure out ways of increasing wages so people can afford it. That means redistribution, and rich people don't like to hear that. This administration simply won't hear of it. But without it, I fear even more Americans will be going hungry in the future.

A fertilizer bomb that kills hundreds in Oklahoma. Fuel-laden civil jets that kill 4000 in New York. A sanctions policy that kills one and a half million in Iraq. A trade policy that immiserates continents. You can make a bomb out of anything. The ones on paper hurt the most.

The current food crisis is an opportunity for companies to engage in agriculture or biotechnology.

One of the most abused country on earth is Mexico. The marketing spills over the border, and people are persuaded to eat food that's bad for them, more in rich countries than in poor ones. I was traveling the world. What really struck me was the way we engage with food - how it's a global phenomenon - the world becoming more and more disconnected from it.

When you have weird policy decisions in the United States that then ripple out throughout the world, the rest of the world really takes it on the chin. When the U.S. decides to set their corn on fire rather than to eat it, which is what the biofuels policy basically is - then that drives up the price of corn. It drives up the price of substitutes. And all of a sudden you have a sort of spiral of food prices. And other countries don't have the resources, because they're not allowed to, to weather the storm.