Michael Wilkerson, writing on World Politics Review's blog, shares a rare bit of good global food news out of Chile. Scientists there have genetically engineered a new strain of rice that can be cooked with one fourth the amount of water. The discovery won't reduce the skyrocketing cost of rice but will dramatically reduce the water and fuel needed to cook it. With destabilizing food riots occurring more and more frequently, anything to give developing world consumers a break is welcome news.

Maybe we don't have to worry that Americans are too dumb to read the Economist after all.

A teenage rap duo in Chicago has recorded a track, aptly called "The Economist," that extols the British publication's breadth and brevity and samples podcast commentary by correspondents Edward Lucas and Anthony Gottlieb.

"The style in which they write is simple and concise, how do they get their sentences so precise?" the rappers wonder. [UPDATE: Matt Yglesias quips, "The answer, of course, is 'heavy-handed editing' facilitated by lack of bylines."]

And the chorus is a gem, too: "He reads the Economist so he can get the gist, its solid competence gives him confidence that his intelligence is correct."

The rappers also weigh in on accusations that the Economist pushes a particular line: "Yes, they have a bias; it's pro-democratic. And pro-free trade; they are very emphatic."

Jay-Z it is not. But it is funny stuff.

(Hat tip: Gawker, Guardian)

ABDURASHID ABIKAR/AFP/Getty Images

Police opened fire on rioting crowds, killing at least two people in Mogadishu, Somalia today. Thousands of angry Somalis had taken to the street to protest rising food prices. Somali staples such as corn meal and rice have nearly doubled in price since January.

When Hillary Clinton signed on to John McCain's proposal to suspend the 18.4-cent federal gas tax this summer and Barack Obama didn't, the Democratic candidates suddenly had a real substantive difference to debate.

The trouble is, there's not much to argue about. Everyone who's looked at this knows that a gas-tax holiday is a silly idea. With gasoline supplies pretty much fixed in the short term, demand will increase and the price will go back up. But instead of the U.S. government capturing that revenue, the oil companies will pocket it. Factcheck.org tried and failed to find a single economist who thought gas prices would drop as a result of the holiday. PBS couldn't find a supporter, either.

Asked about this by ABC's George Stephanopoulos Sunday, Hillary sniffed, "I'm not going to put in my lot with economists." What's it going to be then, prayer circles?

PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images

Now, you might say: There's almost zero chance this proposal will go anywhere, so what's the harm? Well, it makes no sense to say you're for "energy independence" while vowing to cut gas taxes. If anything, the U.S. government should raise the federal gas tax to at least 50 cents a gallon, not cut it. Or better yet, tax carbon and bring coal emissions into the mix, too. But above all, don't mislead voters about the choices before them.

I noted in January that 2007 had been an especially good year for Mosaic, one of the world's largest fertilizer companies and a top performer on Wall Street. Since then, the market has only gotten better for the Minnesota-based company. Here's an updated chart of Mosaic's stock price for the past year:

The St. Petersburg Times has a great interview with James Prokopanko, Mosaic's CEO. Chew on these stats, which go a long way toward explaining what is happening to the fertilizer business:

• It takes five years to get a phosphate (fertilizer) plant up and running
• Ammonia costs have tripled over the past decade
• Sulphur costs have gone from $55 to $450 in the past year
• Ocean shipping costs have gone from $35 to $100
• Morocco, "the Saudi Arabia of phosphate," has raised phosphate prices from $55 to $250 a ton. They're headed for $400 a ton
• China has imposed a 135 percent export tax on fertilizer
• The Indian government will dole out more on fertilizer subsidies in 2008 than it spends on its military

For more on fertilizer, check out today's New York Times story on the subject.

After a record-setting week, the price of rice dropped 3 percent following announcements yesterday that the United States had accelerated its rice planting and that, more importantly, major rice exporters Thailand and Brazil would not impose export bans.

The news may be a drop in the bucket compared to the world-wide "silent tsunami" of inflated food prices (last month saw a 57 percent increase), but as this week's Tuesday Map shows, Thailand's decision to stay in the game was very much needed:

Three of Asia's top rice exporters shown above (China, India, and Vietnam) have already cut their rice exports this year, leaving neighboring importers high and dry. And according to the U.N. World Food Program's executive director, who spoke with FP during her recent visit to Washington, the countries who have the greatest potential for massive unrest, suffering, or starvation are "import-dependent countries, because we're seeing a strain on their capabilities to obtain enough food to meet their needs."

But the global food crisis is unfortunately not limited to import-heavy countries. The WFP estimates that more than 100 million people around the world could soon be without food. The problem has already reached great enough proportions that 33 countries have already seen hunger-driven, social unrest.  

Today, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced he would chair a U.N. task force to create and carry out a response action plan. Let's just hope his efforts don't prove too little, too late.

While reading an article yesterday in the Washington Post about the cost of caring for sick pets, I stumbled across this:

Americans spend an enormous sum on health care for their dogs, cats, birds, fish, ferrets, gerbils, lizards, potbelly pigs and other assorted pets: more than $24.5 billion in 2006 alone, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association. (If you're into comparing vast amounts of money, that's greater than the gross domestic product of more than half of the world's countries.)

Well, I am into comparing vast amounts of money, so chew on this: The U.S. pet healthcare economy is about the size of Bahrain or Botswana's GDP.

Economist and blogger Tyler Cowen sallies forth in the Sunday Times to offer a solution to high prices and shortages of key staple foods: more trade.

The damage that trade restrictions cause is probably most evident in the case of rice. Although rice is the major foodstuff for about half of the world, it is highly protected and regulated. Only about 5 to 7 percent of the world's rice production is traded across borders; that's unusually low for an agricultural commodity.

So when the price goes up — indeed, many varieties of rice have roughly doubled in price since 2007 — this highly segmented market means that the trade in rice doesn't flow to the places of highest demand.

It's a good piece, but Harvard economist and free-trade skeptic Dani Rodrik takes Cowen to task for allegedly forgetting that rice prices in producer countries would likely go up if their farmers exported more. Cowen disagrees; Rodrik writes in Cowen's comment section, "Free trade in rice would do little to alleviate the food crisis we are facing, and in fact would probably make it worse in the short run as it would result in a further increase in the real price of rice on world markets."

All I wish to point out here is that many countries are already reducing tariffs on imported foods, if not rice specifically. According to the World Bank, some 24 of 58 surveyed (pdf) have done so, including India, Peru, Turkey, Mongolia, and Burkina Faso. Perhaps it's only a matter of time before other countries do so as well.

Graphic: World Bank

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Due to skyrocketing rice prices, Liberians are switching to pasta and learning how to twirl spaghetti on a fork. In India, the government has restricted rice exports, and moms are choosing between eating and paying for their children's schooling. Meanwhile in the United States, Wal-Mart's Sam's Club warehouse stores are limiting the sale of 20-pound (9 kg) bags of jasmine, basmati, and long-grain white rice to four per customer.

In the developed world, food shortages might be overhyped. The head of the California Rice Commission told Reuters, "Bottom line, there is no rice shortage in the United States. We have supplies." Plus, how many Americans buy 80 pounds of rice per shopping trip? (Apparently, it's restaurant owners and small-business owners who typically buy in bulk.)

But for people in developing countries, outrageous food prices and shortages are a serious reality. Josette Sheeran, executive director of the U.N. World Food Program, which provides food aid to the needy, told FP in this week's Seven Questions, "This is a silent tsunami." Video, audio, and prepared remarks from her recent talk on global food insecurity at the Center for Strategic and International Studies is also available here.

By the way, if you want to help hungry people get rice, play the Free Rice vocabulary game.

ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images

Political appointees who are forced to resign tend to go quietly, thanking their boss for an opportunity to serve the nation and vowing to spend more time with their families.

Not so Danesh Jaafari (left), the ousted Iranian economy and finance minister. In stepping down from his post on Tuesday, he slammed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's administration in terms that, per the AFP, had "until now been almost unknown in Iranian politics."

During my time, there was no positive attitude towards previous experiences or experienced people and there was no plan for the future," he said in the speech quoted by the Fars news agency.

"Peripheral issues which were not of dire importance to the nation were given priority.

"For example, changing the nation's time took months of our time," he complained.

What is it with authoritarian regimes and clocks? Anyway, this is the best part:

For example the deputy in charge of the economy... is a veterinarian and he does not know much about economy," he added.

Iran's inflation is running at nearly 18 percent and unemployment could be as high as 30 percent, according to the Associated Press. Ahmadinejad has pushed infrastructure spending and handouts to the poor that have only added inflationary fuel to the fire, policies that Jaafari says he opposed while in office. It should be interesting to watch what happens next, with Ahmadinejad up for reelection in 2009.

"Only one country in the world has eliminated the shortage of transplant kidneys," Tyler Cowen Alex Tabarrok reports. "Only one country in the world has legalized financial payments to kidney donors."

What country is that? You'll never guess. Click the link to find out.

I don't know much about astrology, but surely you don't need to be in tune with the stars to make this prediction. All you need to do is read Bloomberg News:

Cambodia celebrated its New Year's Eve on Sunday, with the royal palace astrologer predicting a troubled Year of Rat ahead, including poor crops, inflation and angry wives. Like neighbouring Thailand and Laos, Cambodia follows the Chinese horoscope, but celebrates its lunar New Year in April each year.

"This year's agriculture is not good, with half of the vegetable and fruit crop destroyed," royal palace astrologer Im Borin said by telephone.

"There will be many people killing each other, the good and kind will be looked down on by society ... the price of salt will increase, and wives of high ranking officials will be stewing in anger," he predicted.

In other Cambodia news, today is the 10th anniversary of Pol Pot's death.

(Hat tip: Passport reader Eric Jon Magnuson)

THONY BELIZAIRE/AFP/Getty Images

It's good to see that the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Group of Seven are finally calling for action on the global food crisis that is stirring up political and social turmoil in some 33 countries, per the World Bank's count. Haiti's riotous food crisis has already claimed its prime minister.

With the price of cereal crops like wheat and rice soaring and countries increasingly taking their exports off the market, the situation has become explosive in recent weeks. (On the positive side, food import tariffs are being slashed in the developing world and developed countries are automatically reducing their ag subsidies as prices rise.)

But food prices have been soaring since late 2006. Where have these leaders been for the past year and a half? And what about the U.S. press, which aside from the Financial Times has offered scant high-profile coverage of a crisis that is affecting hundreds of millions of people around the world?

The good news is that if governments act quickly to provide cash transfer payments to the poor, as the Bank recommends (pdf), a great deal of suffering can still be averted. Eventually, I suspect, the high prices will come down as farmers plant more crops and oil prices return to Earth. A couple years from now, we'll probably be talking about how to deal with a global food glut. But how about a little foresight, people?

It turns out the global food-price crisis that we've been following has a silver lining: Growing wheat is now more profitable than growing heroin for Afghan farmers.

(Hat tip: Paul Krugman)

THONY BELIZAIRE/AFP/Getty Images

Food riots seem to be happening around the world on a near-daily basis lately. U.N. peacekeepers fired rubber bullets and tear gas at an angry mob that tried to storm the National Palace in the Hatian capital, Port-au-Prince today. Riots began in Haiti last Wednesday and five people have already been killed in the violence. According to Reuters, the price of rice has doubled over the last six months and Haiti's poor are growing desperate:

If the government cannot lower the cost of living it simply has to leave. That's our decision," said protester Renand Alexandre. "If the police and U.N. troops want to shoot at us, that's OK, because in the end if we are not killed by bullets we'll die of hunger."

Unsurprisingly, Haiti's government is stumped about how to deal with what is, in fact, a growing global crisis.

iStockPhoto

People are literally stealing the roofs off of churches in Britain, the New York Times reports today. Some call it "the most concerted assault on churches since the Reformation." But it's not religious zealotry that's driving the vandals, it's simple economics.

Rising resource demand from China and India coupled with supply disruptions from Australia (the holy trinity of skyrocketing prices) have caused lead prices to jump sevenfold in the past six years. Before 2005, instances of roof theft were few and far between. But last year, one church insurance company reported $18 million in claims, mostly from cases of disappearing lead.  Historical preservation laws mandate the use of original building materials, hence the metal installation and replacement in the event of theft. John Deave, a retired churchwarden, is feeling the pressure:

Whenever I get an early morning phone call these days, I think, 'Oh no, they’ve taken the roof again.'"

Institutions are mulling tough love tactics to prevent further vandalism including barbed wire, roof lights, and slippery drain pipe paint, but mere fences can't stop the forces of supply and demand. This highlights a broader trend in which the West feels a pinch from inflation and commodity price hikes in the developing world. The free ride is ending, folks.

reuters.com

Harry's Bar, the famous Venice restaurant where writer Ernest Hemingway used to hang out and sip martinis, is now offering a discount to "poor" American tourists who must contend with a weakened dollar, one that has resulted in horror stories about $40 ice creams and $10 bottles of water. A sign at Harry's reads:

Harry's Bar of Venice in an effort to make the American victims of subprime loans happier, has decided to give them a special 20% discount on all the items of the menu during the short term of their recovery.

Harry's owner, Arrigo Cipriani, says the number of American customers has fallen between 5 and 10 percent since January. His concern highlights similar worries that European tourism operators have about the weakened dollar.

But how will Harry's tell who's American? Cipriani told Reuters:

We will judge by the accent and if we make a mistake, we will give a 20 percent discount to the English as well.

Now may be a good time to learn to fake an American accent!

KHALED DESOUKI/AFP/Getty Images

Egypt's economic and political pressure cooker gave a kick and a hiss yesterday as a crackdown to prevent a general strike resulted in over 200 arrests throughout the country. The unrest was provoked by rising prices and falling wages. As Blake has reported, Egypt is a big wheat importer with a corrupt bread subsidy program, and the country heads into local elections tomorrow.

Given that Egypt has virtually no organized political opposition, it's not entirely clear who called the strike but those who threatened to stay home included professionals, government workers, and factory laborers as riot police around the country were called out to put down any unrest. A scuffle between textile workers and riot police erupted into exchanges of tear gas and stone throwing in Mahalla al Kobra, north of Cairo.

The government has succeeded in stemming the tide for now.  The Muslim Brotherhood stayed out of the strike, state security agents conducted home visits to make sure government workers reported, and masses of state security forces intimidated a group of protesting workers back to duty.  Abdel Ahad El Meseery of the Kifaya opposition group told the International Herald Tribune:

I am not about to claim that the Egyptian people are finally rebelling...The element of fear is there.  The people are afraid of the government, but the government is afraid of the people."

With so many factions behind the mobilization, and the help of the internet and cell phones, it seems that more than a few officials' faces went pale this past weekend. At least seven of the arrests relating to the protests targeted people who used the internet to advertise the strike.  It's bad news for the Mubarak regime if Egypt's disorganized interest groups are starting to coalesce into something resembling civil society. 

Worse yet, the government may be powerless to control the underlying causes of the unrest.  As as Paul Krugman notes today in his op-ed for the New York Times, "Cheap food, like cheap oil, may be a thing of the past." 

Artyom Korotayev/Epsilon/Getty Images

Greetings from Salzburg, Austria, where I will be blogging this week from the Salzburg Global Seminar's session on Russia: The 2020 Perspective. I'm here thanks to the generosity of the Knight Foundation, which paid my way. I'm by no means an expert on Russia, but with Vladimir Putin's succesor now chosen and the NATO summit freshly ended, the timing couldn't be better for me to get up to speed.

One of the assigned readings for the session was "Putin's Plan," a fascinating  Washington Quarterly article by Brookings scholar Clifford Gaddy and CSIS Russia expert Andrew Kuchins. Gaddy and Kuchins got their hands on a dissertation Putin wrote for his 1997 graduate degree for the School of Mines in St. Petersburg. They argue that the thesis, "Strategic Planning of the Reproduction of the Mineral Resource Base of a Region," does much to explain Putin's behavior as CEO of Russia, Inc. Other scholars, notably the Carnegie Endowment's Martha Brill Olcott, have examined excerpts from the dissertation before, looking for clues to Putin's thinking about the relationship of energy companies to the state. But Gaddy and Kuchins extend the analysis to the Medvedev succession, arguing that Putin was looking above all for someone who could replace him as Russia's top "strategic planner."

In the course of his research, Gaddy discovered that Putin -- or whoever really wrote the disseration -- had actually lifted 16 of the document's 218 pages nearly verbatim from a Russian translation of Strategic Planning and Policy, a 1978 mangement tome written by University of Pittsburgh professors William R. King and David Cleland (though the author did include a reference to the book).

It's actually quite common for Russian politicians to beef up their resumes with questionable degrees and/or have ghostwriters pen their theses. It's also standard practice, I'm told, for intelligence officers to borrow analyses with attribution. Perhaps Putin was merely upholding the academic standards of the KGB, his former employer. Whatever the case, the outgoing Russian president obviously never suffered the fate of U.S. Sen. Joseph Biden, whose presidential aspirations were doomed in 1987 by accusations of plagiarism. Instead, the Russian media leapt to Putin's defense and said that King and Cleland had gotten their ideas from Soviet economists. Still, Russia's CEO seems touchy about the topic. When Gaddy asked Putin about his dissertation a few years back, he tensed up and dodged the question.

As for Dmitry Medvedev, many analysts here seem to be searching for clues that the Russian president-elect won't simply "plagiarize" Putin's policies. Will he be his own man? How long will it be before he can stake out a different path? More on this important issue in the next installment.

Blake Hounshell is Web Editor of ForeignPolicy.com. He has been blogging this week from the Salzburg Global Seminar session on Russia: The 2020 Perspective.

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After promising to do so for months, the Clintons have just released their tax returns. And they've made a pretty penny since Bill left office.

Total income since 2000: $109,175,175

Bill's cumulative speech income: $51,855,599

Last year, it was reported that Bill gave more than 350 speeches in 2006, but that only 20 percent (so, 70 speeches) were for personal income. Their 2006 returns show that he made about $10.5 million that year on speeches, or about $150,000 a pop. So, given that he's commanded far more than that for various events (as high as $450K a speech in '06), I'm actually surprised he hasn't made more.