Exporters monitor economic and political policies to the developing world, but the consequences of that have been to make developing countries far more sensitive to the constant fluctuations. Developing countries are not always allowed to support their farmers in the same way as the U.S. or Europe is. They're not allowed to have tariff barriers. They're forced, more or less, to shrink their social programs. The very poorest people have fewer and fewer entitlements. The consequence of this has been that there's been a chronic increase in the vulnerability of those economies to price shocks.

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.

India has the largest number of hungry people. Yet it's an outcome of precisely the same mechanism. It's the control of agriculture that drives down the price it paid for food that it buys from farmers, who are the poorest people. Then you're paying very little for food. You're underpaying the poorest people in any society. Then they're marketing to us the things that are most profitable to them. And those are the things that are packaged and processed and what-have-you. That means you have the simple thing of the explosion of obesity and hunger as a result of capitalism in our food system.

We need to realize that these industrial methods of farming have gotten us used to cheap food. The corollary of cheap food is low wages. What we need to do in an era when the price of food is going up is pay better wages. A living wage is an absolutely integral part of a modern food system, because you can't expect people to eat properly and eat in a sustainable way if you pay them nothing. In fact, it's cheap food that subsidized the exploitation of American workers for a very long time, and that's always been an aim of cheap food.

The food shortages and high prices have certainly sparked the world media's attention, particularly since they're coming in such diverse places, being everywhere from Haiti, to Senegal, to Bangladesh, to Egypt - a range of countries. That sort of caught the media off guard, and serves the media's prurient interests insofar as "it bleeds, and so it leads".

Exporters monitor economic and political policies to the developing world, but the consequences of that have been to make developing countries far more sensitive to the constant fluctuations. Developing countries are not always allowed to support their farmers in the same way as the U.S. or Europe is. They're not allowed to have tariff barriers. They're forced, more or less, to shrink their social programs. The very poorest people have fewer and fewer entitlements. The consequence of this has been that there's been a chronic increase in the vulnerability of those economies to price shocks.

Right now you're seeing more and more families reporting that they are skipping meals. They're having to give up meat. Mothers are foregoing food so their kids can have something. People are growing their own vegetables, not because they've gone organic, but because it's one of the few assured sources of food they have. For low-income Americans food is costly right now. The price of food has been going up, and wages haven't. This puts working Americans in a real bind. The fact that the mainstream media hasn't reported it doesn't mean that it's not happening.