Lawrence Solomon
National Post FP Comment
March 20, 2008

Climate change continues to wreak havoc throughout the world, Egypt being the most recent example. In the last year, bread prices have climbed 36%, leading to rioting by the hungry. Bread riots are also occurring in Yemen and Pakistan, as they have in other countries over the last year, while in other nations food protests have taken other forms.

The cause of this upset, the Third World perceives, is the wholesale conversion of food crops to fuel uses. With the West’s climate-change-panicked governments desperate to take action, any action, to be seen to be doing something, the world’s agriculture has been turned to the service of filling the gas tanks of the trendy. It is done in the name of sustainable development but just how sustainable is this development?