Rising world food prices !

It is ironic that as the world's poor escape economic slavery from existing on just two dollars a day, this emergence is the main factor in the coming famine that will send food prices through the roof !

It is a fact of life that the world's poor exist mainly on grain and vegetables.   As industrialization gives them a bigger pay packet the first priority is to increase from one meal a day - and pile more food on their plates.  With better food, more children survive to become adults, and with prosperity the whole family adds meat to their diet.  
Meat production takes more land than grain or vegetables, and as sheep, cattle and pig farms increase many such animals become grain fed - and it takes six kilogram of grain for every one kilogram of meat produced.

So many of the poor are subsistence farmers - and when they find paid work they are converted from producers to consumers.

The emancipation from peasant to factory worker happening in India, China and other Asian countries is being exacerbated by industrial changes in the developed nations of the west.   New uses are being found for old products, and the popularity of ethanol as a car fuel has seen forty percent of the American grain crop converted from food to that use.

Urbanization is seeing a decreasing land use for agriculture at the same time as rising living standards are increasing food demand, and that can only lead to an increase in food prices as demand exceeds supply.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development  (OECD ) predicts that by the end of this decade cereal prices will be twenty percent higher - and meat will increase thirty percent.

Unfortunately, the losers will be those who miss out on the benefits of industrialization in poor countries.   Those still stuck in the two dollars a day cycle face a very real famine !

And hungry people are usually angry people !