Let them eat cake (reprise)

Walker's World: New food crisis looms (written by Martin Walker, UPI Editor Emeritus, and also Senior Director of the Global Business Policy Council)

I'm only going to talk about this briefly, because the "seeds" of a longer essay are planted in my mind. And I want it to be good. Awhile back I said Ehrlich (Paul, not Bob) was right (or would be, eventually) -- here's another example, and maybe not even one that he anticipated. It takes money to grow food. If you don't have money (and you're a farmer), you can't buy the seed to grow the food to sell and get more money to buy more seed and grow more food...

Joel Grey was right, money does make the world go 'round. And it also keeps it fed. So now we're facing the possibility of an economic food crisis: not one caused by an inability to grow sufficient food, i.e., yield, but a crisis caused by the inability to buy the resources necessary to sustain high yield. Once again, this demonstrates the knife-edge of global dependence on high-yield agriculture. If the chain breaks somewhere -- lack of money, lack of water, insufficient transport capability -- then there will be scarcity. And the trend is toward more scarcity. This particular problem could mean quite a bit of scarcity, fairly soon. So I'll keep that in the back of my mind.