Quite a good article. It's one of the first by an anti-pop to mention the population crisis in Africa rather than say, Adelaide, Roma or Bendigo.

Food prices are a major problem in Eastern Africa due in large part to corruption and the basic fact that there just isn't enough of it. Of course if we eliminated greed from food markets in Russia and some other eastern European nations who won't export their food until extortive prices are paid or food is used to leverage business deals, then we would fix part of the problem.

While population growth is slowing in Europe, America and Japan, it's stubbornly high in Africa. While we battle with a shrinking young adult tax base and problems caused by an ageing population, Africa will continue to struggle to feed itself.

The problem with the author's analysis is that she just assumes that whatever government does automatically produces better outcomes than would otherwise obtain. She takes no account, and makes not attempt to take account, of the downsides of governmental action, and ignores the question whether these might be worse, in her own terms.

For example, if it were true that government could, by adopting policies, ensure greater abundance of food *with no correspondingly worse downside in its own terms*, why not just collectivise agriculture? There is no excuse for the author's intellectual dereliction in adopting this line of reasoning, since we have just come through a century in which it was tried, at the cost of tens of millions of deaths. And here she's urging political decision-making, central planning, bureaucratic administration, and forced property redistributions as the solution, without in the least addressing the bleeding obvious objections to his criminally culpable policy prescription.

The author also takes no account of the fact that the biggest single factor restricting food production worldwide is government. It has reached the stage now in Australia where much ordinary agricultural activity is illegal. Our agricultural lands are only so because earlier generations changed them from their wild state to make them produce food. These actions, perforce, displaced native vegetation and native animals. But now these are converted by arbitrary fiat into holy cows. The supporters of native vegetation laws, in other words, would rather humans starve than that over-abundant native grasses be cut. That's the level which the anti-human superstition of the environment movement has reduced us to.

And these restrictions are happening all over the western world - the most agricultural productive nations in the world. Socialism is still killing people by the millions.

The problem is not a shortage of food, it's an excess of government and a shortage of freedom.

What we need to do is stop propping up peoples who have overpopulated their bit of the world, & stop giving money to NGOs so they stop wasting our money on hiring consultants, to advise them on how to get more of it.

Maybe if we stopped burning food to fix a non-existant climate change crisis, there would be more food available and lower food prices?

Grey beat me to it! The reason there is a food shortage is because areas that were used to grow food are now being used to grow biofuel. And the reason for that is the government subsidises biofuel farming, driven by daft self-imposed imperatives to 'do something' about global warming -- a natural and highly beneficial process which is being demonised by the self-loathing anti-humanites of the Green left. So two of your 'Trinity' are nothing more than apocalyptic panic and its natural consequence.

When Governments are complicit and Giant Corporations make offers to Farmers they can't refuse, you create a crisis. This scenario is playing out right now here in our country and the groundswell of disapproval has begun.Coal,CSG,iron ore,etc...are far more profitable to both Govt & the Companies so FOOD production will inevitably suffer. We must legislate No Go zones which protects agricultural land. Its the only solution.