Open Letter to Tzipi Livni Israel's Strategic Bind The New Idolatry

Having just reaped a good crop while everyone else had a barren harvest, the farm manager’s conclusion was unequivocal: “This is a time to sell,” he told its owner, the Marquise Lafayette. The marquise, who would later earn fame as a hero of both the American and French revolutions, disagreed. “This is a time to give,” he said, and – as if anticipating the approaching French Revolution – opened his barns to the nearby villages’ starving peasants.

Now is also a time to sell.

With prices of wheat, corn and rice soaring from Southeast Asia to Central America and provoking riots in some three dozen lands from Yemen to Burkina Faso it is clear that the world is facing an alarming food shortage. Average food prices rose in the past year more than 40 percent worldwide, rice appreciated in the past four months alone more than 100%, from $360 to $795 per metric ton, and the World Bank says it will take at least seven years from here until food prices return to where they were back in 2004.

And since there was no Joseph to warn us in time about these impending seven bad years, myriad market players are now engaged in the kind of shooting from the hip that often follows the failure to plan. Vietnam, Cambodia and others with surplus rice have moved to curtail exports and ones suffering shortages, like the Philippines and Egypt, had their armies distribute food, while Washington ordered rice shipments to Manila redoubled as panicky shoppers in Hong Kong and Macau stormed rice stores while the government in Beijing issued an equally panicked promise to secure rice shipments to the two wealthy provinces that only recently returned to the motherland’s bosom.

For the growers all this of course constitutes manna from heaven.

Across the American Midwest farmers say they don’t know what to grow first, as every week another type of grain appreciates even more steeply than all others. The US government now finds it difficult to find ranchers who will take money for resting their fields on a rotational basis, a policy that in more financially balanced times helped preserve the environment. Now it seems no government can compete with the cash returns of a plot’s freshly harvested corn, wheat, barley, potatoes, beets, beans, peas or anything else human bowels will digest.

And so, the question arises: Are