An ‘engineered’ food crisis?

Last week an article titled “How we engineered the food crisis” was in the UK Guardian.  Interestingly, the article does not focus on ‘climate change’ as the cause.  Instead, Henry Miller’s article lists large scale disasters causing localised crop failures, deadly strains of wheat pathogen and rising incomes in major emerging markets, as causing a back drop of lessened supply and increased demand.  He then explains, against that supply/demand backdrop, how our reluctance to embrace new technology and our diversion of food to biofuels, is hindering or making things worse.

He states, ‘Thanks to dysfunctional regulation of genetic engineering and misguided biofuels policy, the world’s poorest are going hungry’.

Here’s the link to the article and a couple of quotes from it:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/mar/20/food-farming

… the United States and Europe are diverting vast and increasing amounts of land and agricultural production into making ethanol. The United States is approaching the diversion of 40% of the corn harvest for fuel…

… higher food prices are a bad thing for the poor because they cannot afford a healthy diet in the first place and are forced to make further cuts on education and health spending if their food bill goes up. We already have close to one billion people go[ing] hungry today, not because there is not enough food in the world but because they cannot afford to buy it…

So, if there are present food crop supply problems and increasing demand:-

Why do we make it harder for food producers to use latest technology to increase their harvest?

Why have we diverted so much land use and crop yield from food production to fuel production?

Is a food crisis being ‘engineered’?

Why would anybody want to do that?

Feel free to offer your comments …