At last world leaders seem to have realised that we are facing a food crisis, but it has taken rising prices to alert them.
Unfortunatly, they seem to think that it will be easy to increase production by using the same methods that have allowed the world population to triple in the past 70 years.
We have been able to replace animal muscle power by engines to free up the 30% of land that was needed to feed those animals, and use fossil derived fertilisers and pesticides to push up yields to unbelievable levels. In farming we now use about 10 calories of finite fossil energy to diliver 1 calorie of food energy. This worked well when those supplies were cheap and plentifull, but will fail when they inevitably become very expensive and scarce.
World leaders should be putting huge amounts of money in to finding sustainable ways to convert more of the abundant solar energy that reaches us each day in to food energy.
Robert Mugabe being there makes the whole conference look like a farce.
