The Next Big Crisis?

One of the online polls on CNN.com the other day raised an interesting personal question:

Do store limits on bulk rice sales worry you?
A little
31%

A lot
16%

Not at all
53%

Total Votes: 193161

I must admit that I am one of the 16% who find myself quite worried. Rice is one of THE staples of world food. To say there is a limit on that resource is downright nerve-wracking. Food issues seem to be creeping back into the news from places quite distant from Darfur, the quintessential food crisis. Haiti, another incredibly difficult place has a food famine. Now Sam's Club limits sales.

I am sure there are many reasons- real and imagined. Artificial limits to keep (or send prices higher) comes from my paranoid mind. Then there is the increasing push to use corn (food) for gas (not food.) There's also the globalization of food production and sales which is highly dependent on oil for growth and transport and therefore on the price of oil.

We are perhaps blindly unaware of how fragile our way of life is in the developed Western World. As we take more and more without enough thought to those where food necessities are a lot less than we throw away, we raise serious specters of anger, death, and destruction. One major world famine brought on by climate change or politics could be world-shattering.

It could also be that the current "crisis" deserves those quotation marks and is another manufactured issue. But I am afraid for many millions around the world it is a reality that all of us need to take seriously.