This morning’s New York Times has a front page article describing the rapidly-escalating crises – including food riots – caused by, among other things, the diversion of food crops – like palm oil and soybeans – to energy production. American farmers’ wholesale switch to heavily-subsidized corn for ethanol, has caused a 20% dip in soybean oil supplies, which is having global consequences, as is the sharp rise in corn prices. The rise in oil prices is causing producers to level virgin forest to plant palms.

Interestingly, this month’s Scientific American has an opinion piece that holds that violent crises in dry-climate nations from Africa to the Middle East to Central Asia have at their root large, poor populations and contention for scarce water supplies, not primarily, as Washington tends to see it, Islamist insurgents. Find ways to provide not guns but water and other basic technology and infrastructure, according to Jeffery D. Sachs, and you’ll solve the problem. Unintended consequences…

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