Ian bell on the agents of famine

IF I believe everything I read, it is my duty to the less lucky and to the planet to become a vegan forthwith. This is a blow. Pasty is not my best colour. Still, if someone would guarantee - and I'm talking about the cast-iron version - that a diet free of animal products would keep everyone fed, I could probably swallow my doubts. And anything else vegans count as sustenance.

If I believe my government, meanwhile, a better bet for the planet would be to fill the car with the now compulsory 2.5% biofuel mix and be on my way with a merry Poop! Poop! A daft noise is always preferred to serious questions about the connections between food production, a poisoned atmosphere, and America's determination to keep on driving no matter what. The less lucky seem not to feature in this particular equation, but there you go: you - or rather they - can't have everything.

An Oxford professor of economics gracing the pages of The Times tells me, at this juncture, that everything I thought I knew was wrong. Such statements are always bracing. We do not need less globalisation producing spectacular (and very profitable) fluctuations in food prices, he says, not if we care about Just About Everything. No, what we really need is much more of the ill-understood process.

Similarly, we really need more GM veg without any faint-hearted nonsense - economics professors moonlight as biotechnology experts - over possible consequences. We also need to stop trying to protect the peasant farmers of Africa when their only hope - as in "realistic hope" - is industrialised factory production run, obviously, by multinationals.

I spy metaphors. On that count, the poetic parallels between globalisation and global warming become one of history's two-for-one offers. Unstoppable, awesomely destructive and uncontrollable, forcing us all to adapt or suffer the consequences: I'm not talking about the weather. The good professor also provoked the reaction I usually get when economics and common sense are mentioned in the same breath. His recommendations might fix the world, but would you still want to live there?

The great biofuels fad, in that context, is almost pure metaphor. Undermining food production and forcing up prices just to keep cars on the road is rather like a billionaire throwing banknotes on the fire because he feels a bit chilly. He has wads of cash. He thinks it will never run out. As for the consequences of his actions and the poor at his door, he echoes the rich villain in that cinematic masterpiece, The Simpsons Movie: "I want to give something back. But not the money, obviously".

The vegan option is, meanwhile, reminiscent of those metaphors you used to hear, if blessed, at Sunday school. I'm thinking of the one that explained how African babies got hungry because we didn't clear our plates and fork over our sixpences. It didn't do to ask how they got to be hungry in the first place. Now considered opinion has it that the decent response to food shortages is to starve a little. No symbolism is intended.

That, though, is point one: there are no food shortages. Instead, according to one of those complicated theories they teach at Oxford and the like, there are money shortages. Or rather - and this is apparently so complicated it never gets discussed - some people are very short of money and some are anything but. Blips aside, and biofuels excepted, global food production is increasing, yet that is, apparently, neither here nor there. This is a remarkable phenomenon.

Food prices leap, just like that, and those selling the food are forced to accept a lot more money than they received last week, last month, or last year. Some people can even guess, or least speculate very hard, about when this magic is likely to happen. This is never, ever described by a respectable politician as cheating. In fact, it is never described.

STILL, before I go vegan, there is something to be said for clearing one's plate before adopting the Year Zero diet. Seriously. In the industrialised West food is wasted on, well, an industrial scale. Some people are even talking about taking our leftovers and using them to produce - you guessed - energy. Another metaphor.

Estimates of food wasted in Britain vary, but 10% of the total - the fish supper you couldn't finish, the pork pie half an hour past its sell-by - is a conservative estimate. A country of 60-ish million could cut its soaring food bills by that 10%, and probably by much more if it stopped treating grub as litter and rediscovered the old habit of finishing a meal.

If nothing else, it would spare most of us the humiliation of dutifully "recycling" the wrappers from dishes we couldn't be bothered to eat. It might even avert another of those gruesome metaphors, mass obesity. Yet there is no getting around it (or most of us): animated debates over food prices and the threat to the world's poor acquire a surreal meaning when the speakers could stand to lose a few pounds. The flab you complain about, and quite right too, is someone else's monthly nutrition.

Gross, I know, but such is the nature of this controversy. Meat consumption in China has now reached British (1kg weekly) levels on average, meaning that prosperous Chinese are both consuming at Western levels and clearing the plates, metaphorically, of the rural poor. Meat-bearing beasts need a lot of feeding themselves. This, with the avid assistance of busy speculators, has helped to force up grain prices globally. One result came last week when Scottish pig farmers pleaded with the executive for aid. Feeding their animals to feed us has become an impossibly expensive business.

Food matters: trust me for the self-evident. What I mean is that fear of a food shortage runs deep in the collective psyche. In Africa, they don't need to be reminded. In a newly developing state such as China, memories remain powerful. The Beijing regime can deal with a fuss over Tibet, protests over human rights, or the absence of democracy. A threat to the food supply produces something like panic. If anything is liable to rouse a people who understand hunger in the context of their history, it is a sharp increase in the cost of staples.

The West is different. The West has forgotten. Food has become expensive, but no-one believes Tesco will ever let us down. Bread and milk have become terribly dear, but the shelves (it's a market forces thing) still groan. Thirty-three nations face serious political instability, according to the World Bank, because their food is becoming unaffordable, but we still consider planetary hunger as evidence of a "downturn", along with oil at $115 a barrel (again, no shortage), mortgage miseries, and whining bankers.

We may have a lesson yet to learn, I think. The relationships between land, food security, politics and bread at £1.13 a loaf are not abstract. The laws of economics should not be mistaken for acts of God. They reflect choices made by people. Last week the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development was published. At 2500 pages, it was not scribbled on the back of an envelope. Its main findings were simple enough, however.

There is enough food for everyone. It is cheaper and, broadly, more nutritious than it has been in decades, but 800 million go hungry. As populations increase, meanwhile, as pressure on land grows, this bizarre disparity will become more evident. If you believe the report, things will get much worse unless attitudes towards food production and the trade in food are changed. If not, the produce in our supermarkets will grow steadily more expensive. For the world's poor, too often, that produce will become unattainable.

GM won't help much, they claim; biofuels will make matters worse; climate change will challenge every best effort; and market forces - the versions the West perverts to its advantage - will continue to be agents of famine. Perhaps the comical vegans have a point.