Got Food?

181 Nations Agree to Lower Food Prices says the headline today. And no this was not an Onion article. There was a UN conference in Rome where well fed bureaucrats hung out in luxury hotels, ate 5 star quality food, drank $5000 a bottle wine and in between threw around ideas about how to make food cheaper. Kinda like Al Gore flying around in his private jet and thinking about ways to reduce polution.

After a week of brainstorming and crunching numbers, this is what they came up with:
- tariffs are bad for food prices
- using farmland to grow corn used in biodiesel is bad for food prices
- growing more food will lower food prices

The only real shocker for me out of this meeting was that somehow Bush wasn't directly responsible for high food prices. Or maybe it is his fault but that is so obvious to everyone, no need to actually say it.

So now what do we do? On one side we have the Global Warming alarmists screaming about bio-diesel. But now the UN has finally clued in that when you use farmland as a substutute for oil fields, that lost food production doesn't magically appear out of nowhere and people go hungry. What to do? Save an endagered molusc which will die if the temperature rises 0.01 degrees or feed a hundred million people? And no this in not a rhetorical question, this is the real world situation that we are facing right now.

And it is also a preview of things to come. Every insane proposal from Kyoto to the Lieberman-Warner bill will have the same sort of unintended consequences. This cult like following of Global Warming is going to cost untold amounts of money and even lives. Yet the vast majority of media outlets and politcians - from both parties - are still on board with this madness.