The world food crisis calls for a new kind of food aid.
Needed is an international Marshall Plan of technology, training and logistical support to help hungry countries increase their own food production. The United States could be the world leader in that effort. That's a role the next occupant of the White House should consider.
The need for such a plan grew out of the recent, shameful and disappointing U.N. World Food Crisis Summit in Rome. Big nations sat around, pointed fingers, and moaned about backyard politics.
At a time of widespread hunger, food riots, and political instability related to food, the summit was an immoral flop, issuing only a soggy, whining official statement.
The United States is the world's biggest provider of food aid - a proud record that must continue. The Bush administration, rightly, has called for $5 billion more aid over the next two years.
But a new kind of international effort is also needed that transcends mere food delivery. Unfortunately, at the conference, the United States did nothing to show it would lead such an effort.
The main driver of the food crisis is runaway inflation. As oil prices have shot up, staples such as wheat and rice have skyrocketed. It's more expensive to farm, to produce, to transport. The rich are fine, not poorer countries. Good ideas were few in Rome.
Meantime, the industrialized world worsens the situation as governments subsidize their farmers and slap heavy tariffs on food from other countries. The European Union is a high, stony citadel of protectionism; so is the United States, whose recently passed farm bill is a valentine to the agricultural cartels.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon was right to call on the big boys to bring down these artificial props. But at the Rome sit-down, Brazil and Argentina said they wouldn't. Ditto the United States. Farm subsidies are popular at home. Who cares if they're hungry in Africa?
If you can't do much about oil prices and no one will touch subsidies or tariffs, what's left?
The answer: Help countries produce more of their own food. In the 1990s, globalization flooded smaller countries with cheap food from elsewhere. Local farmers couldn't compete; many switched to other crops or gave up. In Africa, hit with dozens of food riots, local agriculture has shrunk. There and in Asia, logistics is also a huge problem: It does little good if you can grow it but can't get it to your hungry people.
Here's where all countries, especially the United States, can join hands. There's a good model: the anti-HIV/AIDS efforts of the past eight years. Big countries learned you can't just dump medicine and leave; you have to help build roads, identify other needs, plan deliveries, work with local people, local market forces.
This is an ideal approach to food. With oil sky-high, home production makes even more sense. Keep up the food aid; now deliver the trucks, combines, know-how, the fruits of the agricultural revolution.
Food-rich countries, led by the United States, could readily help smaller countries address more of their food needs. Disgusting spectacles such as the Rome conference simply make the world hungrier for something better.