The Politics of Starvation

The growing world food crisis looks like a montage in a disaster movie–crowd scenes of hungry rioters in Haiti, Egypt and Africa’s Ivory Coast; close-ups of emaciated mothers holding out starving children to anyone who will feed them; well-fed gray men in paneled rooms clucking impotently.

Before the World Bank meeting last weekend, president Robert Zoellick talked about the growing emergency caused by doubling wheat and rice prices in the past year. “While many are worrying about filling their gas tanks, many others around the world are struggling to fill their stomachs and it’s getting more and more difficult everyday,” he said.

But at the meeting, nothing was done. An official of the International Monetary Fund observed that “the best sort of response is to allow market forces to operate, to allow prices to rise so that there can be a supply response.”

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