At least 73 million people depend on the World Food Programme (WFP). Without the food delivered by the programme, they would starve. Their future is looking grim because the WFP can no longer afford to buy the food aid it needs. So this week, the WFP is pleading with donor governments to find $500 million by the end of April. If the money doesn’t come, rations that are already sparse will be cut.

The WFP can’t afford to buy enough food because shortages are pushing prices skywards.

The shortages are due to:

1. Weather disasters destroying crops and damaging soils — as in the US Midwest this month, beset by widespread flooding that will reduce the crop area this season.
2. Biofuel production. In 2000, only 6% of the USA’s maize — corn — crop went to make biofuels. This year, 2008, it will be about 50%. The biofuels market is sucking up the former surplus that was exported: the USA supplied 40% of all the maize traded internationally. Intensive biofuel production, dependent on heavy applications of agrochemicals and fertilisers, is also very bad for soil fertility, and reduces the capacity of soils to grow food crops in the future.
3. Loss of farmland to waterlogging, salination, erosion, pollution, and urban and industrial development. Just in the USA, 3 million acres annually are lost to future food production. This is a huge area nearly two-thirds the size of Wales, lost every year.

So we have less land on which to grow crops, and face a future in which yields will be lower because the artificual boost from fossil energy will have gone, and will be more unpredictable because of diminishing reserves of fresh water. Add in the impacts of climate change — rising sea levels, more extreme weather — and the alarming outlook demands urgent action.

Sadly, the UK’s brand new National Security Strategy fails to grasp that a population without food has no security. Just ask the 73 million dependent on the World Food Programme.