A new fetish

From times to times, the media find a new subject that is characterised as a totally new thing, sometimes as dangerous as a menace to the mankind. The last one was the warming of the Earth, but it is been substituted by the ultimate danger, at least of this week, the food crisis.
Let´s think, is there a food crisis? Depends on what you call a crisis. The Oxford Dictionary says: crisis is a time of great difficulty or danger or when an important decision must be made. So... well, I think, no, we are not in a food crisis.
Despite some prices pumping worries into the economists minds, and some governors, they are all but a glimpse of scarcity. The world has never produced more food than today. Malthus would not say I said because he would be to ashamed about the way its previsions have been destroyed by the time. On the contrary of his expectations, the harvests are showing a faster pace of grow than the population.
Perhaps this stupid foreign is nuts, the reader can be thinking: how then are the prices of staple food increasing instead plunging? Because we are in the edge of the greater cultural crisis the mankind has passed by. The globalisation produce a lot of good stuff, but a stress a lot behaviours in the touching new peoples. One of the biggest is the way as the alimentary standards are changing quickly.
More than any scarcity, is the changing of the pattern of consumption that is driving to a dearer lunch. When every people used to have different staple, the prices were easily controlled by the governments, with the most curbing imports to please local farmers. This has prevented the World to create a real global market to the most part of the crops and yet is responsible to the unbalance of the prices.
Of course everybody can say that to the poor it is a food crisis, but it is not. It is just the new surge of the permanent inequality that cyclically hits them with lack of food relieved by humanitarians programs that help more the rich´s consciences than change the structural causes.