Drive or eat

It's official. What a lot of people feared and what looked a coherent truth has been empirically verified. If you can believe the World Bank that is. The biofuel turn of the last few years has driven food costs up 75% around the world. Petrol prices are the most telling piece of evidence that there is a crisis going on for most of us. But since the cost of driving in Britain has fallen 10% in the past ten years (whilst the cost of public transport has risen by 6% in the same period) one should look further afeild for the real structural nature of this latest tremor in world capitalism.

"Political leaders seem intent on suppressing and ignoring the strong evidence that biofuels are a major factor in recent food price rises," said Robert Bailey, policy adviser at Oxfam. "It is imperative that we have the full picture. While politicians concentrate on keeping industry lobbies happy, people in poor countries cannot afford enough to eat."

Nearly a billion people are going hungry right now - not because of some easy Malthusian reasons for because of our dear leaders' deliberate political choices - of which this biofuel bollocks is but the most appalling of all.