These figures are staggering. The human costs are unimaginable. Some 18,000 children a day die from starvation. Families are destroyed, lives shattered. These deaths are excruciatingly painful and many are preventable.

Most of us rarely even feel hungry and often mistake dehydration for hunger. Yet, 11 million children live in American households that are forced to skip meals for financial reasons, according to Bread for the World, a Christian organization fighting hunger.

They estimate that one in 10 households either lives with hunger or is at risk from it. In an affluent country, the crime of hunger is grave indeed. I hesitate to refer to America as "wealthy," since wealth must be measured by more than just financial wellbeing.

The insatiable appetite of the so-called richest nations for fuel and cash crops has crowded out basic staples in the most challenged countries. Economic growth is perceived as an unmitigated good and "development" is measured by monetary and resource yardsticks.

America is concerned about its oil insecurity, for which we are willing to go to war and kill (literally) countless Iraqis, wreak havoc on our own soldiers, and grow crops for food. We are willing to sacrifice those living on the margins to feed our oil addiction.

The obscene regimes of subsidized agriculture have drastically undermined local food production. Zeigler castigated the European Union for dumping its agricultural surpluses on Africa, which "completely ruins African agriculture."

America subsidizes our farmers at grotesque levels, making it nearly impossible for other food growers to compete with our agricultural products and resulting in the collapse of sustainable, local farming. Powerful agricultural and farming lobbies make reform unlikely.

Our rapaciousness has also led to higher fuel and fertilizer prices, which only exacerbate these food shortages. We consume at monstrously disproportionate levels with the so-called "developing" world. What an irony that greed and avarice are benchmarks of "development"?

Globalization and the grand lie of laissez-faire capitalism have led to the dismantling of state-run marketing boards across the globe, which release food with bad harvests or natural disasters. Shrinking harvests and increased demand have serious reduced grain stockpiles.

Recent reports of food riots breaking out across the planet indicate that the hardest hit are all suffering from floods, droughts, and the like. Grain simply is not available for these countries and is extremely expensive when it is.

Significant social and political upheavals are likely in some 40 countries, according to recent estimates, where already economically challenged families are spending half their income on food. Food riots in Haiti are only the tip of this revolutionary iceberg.

Widespread lack of access to food threatens to destabilize more than just those countries. Another wicked irony is increasing instability occurs in many of the countries that the U.S. considers critical for its geopolitical designs: Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, Indonesia, and the beat goes on.

In the words of Malcolm X, the chickens are coming home to roost.

Our callous disregard for those we deem unworthy are risking the very security that helped produce the problems in the first place. Upheaval, rebellion, even revolution might result from the widening rich/poor gap and massive food shortages.

Green revolution rice, once touted as a planetary panacea, also has devastated the environmentally sound and sustainable, local practices among the biggest rice producing nations. Industrial-scale monoculture and chemical overuse is magnifying the shortages.

According to food experts, we must provide safety nets to prevent widespread starvation. We must extend emergency aid and promote local sustainability, not cash crops. We must help limit food price volatility.

We must end our fool's biofuel errand. We must rethink our subsidy regimes and retool our love affair with globalization. We must curb our voracious appetites or kill millions. Basically, we must care.

Think globally, consume responsibly and act democratically.