Food is one of the most essential commodities required for human existence, the thought of the lack of which makes us shiver. We have always, in the school textbooks read and dreaded the horror story of the Bengal famine and while the famines the world over have been equally ugly, the one in Bengal had a more horrible side to it as it wasn’t the angst of nature but actually a man-made one. The famine which took the lives of approximately four million people was actually created with the British Indian government diverting the food grains to feed its army and the allied armed forces that were at war during World War II. The whole scenario when imagined seems to be extremely pathetic with people dying of hunger, even the rich couldn’t do much except for feeding some who would come to them with whatever surplus grains they had. When, on the other side the government was hoarding the grains for themselves and their armies leaving even the farmers and their families famished. While the situation at that time was scary, the one that is currently haunting people globally is again of a food crisis, this time though on a much larger scale.

Inflation seems to have hit almost all the countries of the world leading to a steep rise in one of the most important commodities that is food. The food price hike is of the worst kinds of price rise which affects almost everyone and makes basic survival difficult. This food price hike is directly proportional to the encouragement for the use of bio-fuel. The concept of bio-fuel is that it generates fuel using food grains thus limiting the use of fossil fuels and crude oils by substituting it by these. However, the bio-fuels require burning of food grains to form fuel which means the food grain that was initially cultivated to feed the population is now being shared in its use to produce bio-fuel. These bio-fuels fetch the farmers a higher price in the market than food grains in their original form would. Hence, the farmers have taken to producing gains which is useful in producing bio-fuel and selling it off for the same thus, in the process, creating a food scarcity which eventually leads to price hike.

This is the problem faced by countries like America; however, India too is by the day contributing lesser amounts to the total food requirement of the world. This can be contributed to the fact that most agricultural land in the country is being claimed for industrial purposes the major example for which would be the ‘Nandigram issue’ of Bengal, where a big patch of cultivable land was claimed for infrastructural purposes. While the world is worried about the grave problem of global warming it too is contributing to the food price hike by bringing about climatic changes which adversely affects the crop.

All these factors combined together have bought about a price hike so steep that it is an issue that has to be dealt with immediately otherwise before global warming the famine brought about by food shortage would claim all the lives on the Earth. At such a time what the governments of the countries around the globe have to decide is whether they want the fuel to foster their economies or food to feed its population. The decision is a difficult one but is imperative and a quick one would save the planet from what could be the worst possible war. With riots for food already taking place in many countries of the world, a big war doesn’t seems to be a far-fetched thought and efforts to avoid it should be considered seriously.

Image

Via: Desicritics