THE RICH WORLD AND THE FOOD CRISIS

Leaders of the G-8 nations gathered in Tokyo, Japan, to root out the culprits in a food crisis that has moved hundreds of millions from subsistence to starvation. In fact, they only have themselves to blame, says Adam Lerrick, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

The G-8 countries' interventions have distorted global agricultural markets to the paralysis point, says Lerrick. Indeed, the new famine is not about a crisis in global supply. Markets are full of food that developing-nation consumers can not afford to buy:

• Prices for rice, corn, wheat and soy beans, the staple crops for world sustenance, have doubled in a single year.
• In poor countries, where many spend 75 percent of their earnings to eat, real wages have been cut by a life-changing one-third.
• One-third of the world's population now lives under food price controls.
• In the name of conservation, U.S. farmers have been bribed to keep fields fallow -- 36 million acres of cropland, the size of Iowa, at a taxpayer cost of $2 billion a year.
• In Europe, large farmers have been compelled to leave 10 percent of their holdings idle.


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