There's a great Op-Ed in today's New York Times on the reasons behind the coming food crisis. Paul Krugman talks about bad policy (the focus on using grains to produce biofuels, the war in Iraq), bad luck (a combination of weather-related factors that have conspired to cut the grain supply worldwide), and a complacency about long-term trends (the increasing tendency of third-world countries to prefer a western, meat-based diet) as the causes of restricted global food supplies.
His conclusion? Cheap food may be a thing of the past.
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