Well maybe no one in the industrialized world of you and me is facing the prospect of having to eat dirt to quell an empty belly, but there is definitely a problem here as prices rise and by all accounts will continue to do so until 2009 when the actual food shortages that plague developing countries like China and Vietnam begin to hit us closer to our own waistlines.

An interesting article in this week’s Time outlines what seems to be a pretty modest plan for turning this latest global crisis around: a reduction of cash incentives that already have farmers using 17% of their plantable land to grow corn for biofuel and the gas tank instead of human consumption in addition to a call for an international effort to supply farmers in poor countries with high quality seed and fertilizer (a program that has already worked in Malawi).

Time’s plan calls for a modest amount of cooperation, sacrifice and about $10 billion dollars (to be collected from the have nations and give to the really-don’t-have-anything-to-eat nations), but in my opinion it will be the first two criteria rather than the last that will be hardest for some western countries to give. Already the U.S. Congress is ready to chuck the baby with the bath water while farmers protest their innocence, and even though biofuels were never a good idea, it bears noting that our Senators and Representatives adopted the idea with no more thought than they are giving to axing it. Reactionary as usual, the loss of ethanol is going to ding the U.S. economy every bit as much or more than rising food prices, and it won’t correct the short term problem of this year or probably next. Congress can dismantle the ethanol incentives in the blink of an eye, but corn can’t be grown nearly as fast.

Food shortages are not going to go away simply because biofuels can’t feed us. We’ve mismanged our farmlands to the point that we have robbed them of the minerals needed to grow nutritious food. The food we eat is nutritionally void to the point where minerals and vitamins have to be added to those grains that are processed. Fertilizers can make bankrupt soil farmable but they can’t put nutrition into the food that is grown. That comes only from healthy earth and our soil is laden with nothing but man-made chemicals and environmental waste.

My husband thinks it is time we got serious about gardening and learned to can our produce, and with bread over five dollars (CAN) a loaf, breadmaking is in our future as well. Growing some of our own produce and making breads will not solve food shortages in Asia or bring prices down here, but it is something we can do for ourselves and maybe that is a solution after all.