Prof Paul Collier: A serious crisis, made worse by shortsighted governments

The responses to the food crisis have been dysfunctional. By banning exports, food-exporting countries intensify shortages and discourage their farmers from investing in extra output. Food-importing countries have been grabbing land in an attempt to pre-empt supply: such blatant neo-colonialism is a recipe for political confrontation.

The consequences of the crisis are alarming. Many Third World cities are largely fed from imported food. Poor families already spend about half of their budget on food – they cannot protect themselves.

As they go hungry, the adults will protest and, if prices remain high for more than two years, their infants will suffer stunting. The main cause of the food crisis provides little guidance to its solution. Because the emerging market economies are prospering, their citizens are eating more.

But doomsday scenarios are avoidable – there is plenty of scope for increased supply, although none of the effective solutions will be palatable to environmental romantics. There is scope to raise the productivity of African agriculture. Farmers and pastoralists are occupying vast tracts of land that could produce more if better managed. There are scale economies in agriculture – total factor productivity per acre increases with farm size.

To counter climatic deterioration we need to accelerate crop innovation. It is ridiculous that in the face of a mounting food crisis Europe and most of Africa ban the use of genetically modified organisms. And America should drop its extravagant subsidies of diverting grain into biofuels. If it wants to use biofuels, it should buy them from Brazil, which can grow them far more efficiently.

The writer is professor of economics at the University of Oxford and author of 'The Plundered Planet'