A shorter version of the article online.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1725975,00.html

Food prices rising all around the world. First is wheat price, then comes soyabean bla bla and den now rice prices is rising too!

What causing this rise in food prices. I've been thinking the key cause would be global warming, perhaps global warming made the yields of our crops become lesser and because of the change in climate, less land is favourable for planting crops.

I thought this was the only reason. Never did it came to my mind that what thing that caused all this problem is again, Human.

Many countries are promoting green fuels which mean using organic fuels to power your vehicles rather than fuels from fossil fuels such as coals or oil as it produces carbon dioxide and causes global warming.

However, the increase in needs of producing the organic fuels from crops such as soya beans have placed a increase in demand for land to plant soyabean. and where do the land come from?

They come from the amazon forest.

A tiny sliver of transitional rain forest is surrounded by hectares of soybean fields in the Mato Grosso state, Brazil. (picture taken from TIME magazine)

Can you imagine? Large areas of amazon forests are cleared for the planting of soybean for organic fuels. However, the externalities of cutting down the amazon forest outweights the benefits of replacing fossil fuels with organic fuels as shown by research. Without the amazon trees, the emission of carbon dioxide goes up again. This means the effort is futile and so far, ONLY the sugarcane plant can bring about more benefits than than the harm it brings about.

Another point to note is that the amount of grains needed to produce organic fuels to fill a SUV tank can feed a person for a year. That means our food, are directed to feed machines rather than human itself.

With a decrease in supply, farmers changing to planting the organic fuels crops rather than what we prefer to eat for food( or in economist terms, the food that we demand). And food/crops used for organic fuels.(Not counting in the decrease in supply brought abt by climate change itself)
And a increase in demand, increase in population.

No wonder the price of food is rising so dramatically.
A few days after i read this article in my company's(camp's company) office.

The report of the price of Rice rising by 30% because of the organic fuel thingy was reported on mediacorp news.

This problem is so real. We, the mankind are causing problem for ourselves. And what the heck? We, the consumers are paying for this mistake! (this sentence is what written in the article too, we are paying for it, the increase in food prices, plus the increase in emission of carbon dioxide from cutting of amazon forest which inturns cause global warming)

This article really set me thinking. Its a combination of both geography and economics. Im so very interested in this areas arh. I guess ill try them out when i join FASS in '09! wooohoo.