Leader: Against the grain

In Britain, surging grocery prices are painful, but not life-threatening. For much of the rest of the world, by contrast, food prices are a matter of life or death. China, the world’s largest wheat producer, is suffering a severe winter drought which looks likely to devastate this year’s harvest. It is setting aside a billion dollars to snap up supplies in the market, with the inevitable result that other, poorer countries will lose out. When global food costs surge, starvation usually follows.

At times like this, it is harder than ever to justify why we in the West are encouraging farmers to grow crops to fill car petrol tanks, rather than people’s stomachs. The biofuels fad is one of many expensive and woefully ineffective ways of replacing our dependence on fossil fuels. In the United States, a quarter of all grain harvested is sent to ethanol distilleries to produce fuel for cars — enough to feed 350 million people for a year.