Mark, you are taking a simplistic view of this situation that is developing and knowing how inteligent you are I suspect you are pulling my wires just to see me jump. What I see as the crime against humanity is that first we made grain so cheap that small farmers working by hand could not compete in the market place. They left their farms to go to the city in part because the city paople were eating our cheap mass produced food stuffs that in some cases are sold at a sometimes deep discount into the third world. These people are hungry even in good times. When food imports are reduced the people that miss even more meals are at the lower end of the economic spectrum. When the cost of food goes up by a small fraction most of the world's poor meet that increased cost not by paying more, but by buying less. The stress put on the food distribution system now has to be seen to be believed. Basic staples such as grain and rice have as much as doubled in price due to taking ethanol grain out of the market and by inflation.

Think of the poor as so many cattle in a feed lot. Now imagine what happens when all of a sudden without warning the farmer cuts off the feed or only supplies enough that specially gifted cows are able get sufficient feed. There will as anatural consequence be some kind of serious crowding at the feed trough.

That basically is what we have done to many of the world's poor.We caused the problem to a substantial degree by dumping cheap agricultural products in the third world and we sure as hell exacerbated the problem by cutting off their food supply in a time frame too short for them to mediate the immediate effects.

Sense of family is to a major degree stronger in the third world than here where many of us get fixated on our toys and comforts. The payback for mommy and daddy watching their bunch of very skinny kids and dead babies will likely provide interesting times. The political opportunity derived from reduced expectations and widespread family/economic hardship is just too great not to be exploited. It for example put Sandanista guns in the hands of people that a scant time before were perfectly happy with their lives.

Drac