The second reason for low food prices is that farmers have never had to pay the real cost of food production. Take for example the ground water used to irrigate crops. Agriculture uses more water than any other human enterprise and exploits underground aquifers at increasingly unsustainable rates.

Fresh water supplies will soon become more limiting to human enterprise than oil reserves. How long can society justify agriculture getting a public resource essentially for free when the average household will soon be paying $50 to $100 a month for a mere drop out of the agricultural bucket?

Farming is the single biggest source of all pollution in North America -- yes, even bigger than heavy industry. What would happen to food prices if farmers had to pay for water contamination caused by fertilizer runoff, the silting or rivers due to soil erosion, the loss of biodiversity caused by cultivating marginal areas, the health impacts of pesticide drift, or the many other adverse externalities associated with farming?

Now we are seeing record prices for grains (soon to be translated into large price increases for all our food) because our production is no longer in excess of our demand. Why? Because hypocritical politicians, desperately trying to pose as environmentalists while secretly gratifying corporate lobbyists, have decided we should burn food in our cars -- even though pressing every single arable acre in America into biofuel production could barely provide 20 percent of our current vehicle fuel demands.

Generous government subsidies are being used to incentivize biofuel development, despite extremely slender energy returns and highly doubtful environmental benefits. Burning ethanol produces more ozone than gasoline and, unlike CO2, ozone is a direct human health hazard.

Production of biofuels requires massive amounts of water and will reduce our water security in regions where it is already endangered. Politicians promoting biofuels are essentially using our taxes to subsidize a massive increase in the price of our food without improving our energy independence or environmental quality in any meaningful way.

Farmers have a right to be happy they are finally getting a better return on their crops.

But society is not well served when feedlots and bakeries are forced to compete with service stations for grain.

Any more than is it well served by the industrialization of vast tracts of pastoral countryside with wind turbines to produce a pathetic dribble of over-priced, unreliable electricity that cannot replace any conventional generation.

But these massive boondoggles continue unabated, fueled by the incessant greed of the large corporations happily installing ethanol plants and wind turbines at the expense of the taxpayer. Wind and biofuels may produce energy that is 'renewable' in some limited sense, but they are far from environmentally benevolent and are completely without merit as long term solutions for society's energy needs.

The real value of these "renewables" to politicians is not energy, but rather the "feel-good" sense of false gratification they seem to induce in gullible, uninformed voters.