Madam, - The UN-led taskforce established to address the world food crisis is welcome and necessary. Famine might be a worst-case outcome if nothing is done, but the potential for widespread social unrest and malnutrition - both harbingers of serious health and development side-effects - looms large.
The taskforce must reorder its priorities, however. The diversion of cropland and grains to biofuels - while millions of the world's poor go hungry - is an inhuman disgrace. People come first, and the concept of starving the world's poor to assuage some "green" guilt complex among western SUV-owners is absurd.
Goal is currently working to avert a potential famine in the Afar and Oromia regions of Ethiopia, where grain prices have tripled in recent months, squeezing poor farmers and consumers, as well as aid agencies working to save lives. The price rise was "fuelled" by the car-friendly increase in grain production and by US/EU subsidies for biofuels.
One presumes that "saving the planet" is a project for the benefit of all the world's people, present and future, rich and poor. Therefore the UN task force must address the politically indefensible relegation of a basic human right - that of access to sufficient food - to a level below abstract environmentalism and the greed of consumers and automobile manufacturers. - Yours, etc,
JOHN O'SHEA, Goal, Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin.