Seems a little curious that NPR ran a story on the rice price crisis of 2008 today - three and a half years later and a week late for World Food Day.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2011/11/02/141771712/how-fear-drove-world-rice-markets-insane
Still, it's a clear and succinct account of how fear and greed created hunger when there was enough to go around. And how globalization and nationalism work at cross purposes sometimes. Certainly India had a right not to sell its rice crop. But that wonderful story of US rice sitting in silos in Japan where it is not wanted, and, unless things have changed, is used for rice derivatives, not for the table as rice, where only Japanese rice is used.

Ah the curious mix of human fraility and sinfulness with cultural pride and preferences.

One wonders when this will happen again.