World Hungry

The forces of status quo and inertia scream at any request for improvement.  Energy plans that could get the US to 20% renewables by 2020 have been called unrealistic.  Reducing our national carbon footprint by any percentage has been challenged as too expensive.

But according to a new report from the UN, by 2030 the world has another daunting task: a 50% increase in the production of food.

World food production must rise by 50 percent by 2030 to meet increasing demand, U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon told world leaders Tuesday at a summit grappling with hunger and civil unrest caused by food price hikes.

Food riots have broken out in over two dozen countries this year, and many nations have seen food prices rise 100% or more -- which is tough to tolerate when 15% of your budget is going to food, but a recipe for disaster when 80% of your budget was already going for food.  Food prices are adding to destabilization, which threatens to send food prices up again, resulting in a spiral of starvation and war.

The amount of involvement biofuels play in the food crisis is still undetermined.  However, there's one aspect of food policy that may need to finally change, despite forces that have kept this policy firmly in place for decades.

Wealthy nations' subsidizing their own farmers makes it harder for small farmers in poor countries to compete in global markets, critics of such subsidies say. Jim Butler, the FAO's deputy director-general, said in an interview ahead of the gathering that a draft document that could be the basis for a final summit declaration doesn't promise to overhaul subsidy policy.

The Bush administration spoke out against the recent farm bill as a stunt, knowing they'd get to wag the "fiscal conservative" finger without actually taking any election year heat.  

But Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress will be facing this issue again, and they won't have that luxury.