It seems our president is keen on leaving office while leaving people wagging their tongues all around the world. The latest salvo in the battle between Bush and US diplomacy, were his comments about the food crisis :

Speaking to employees at a high-tech firm in St. Louis recently, Bush noted that much of the developing world was prospering and that U.S. businesses could benefit. As an example, he cited India, where the "middle class is larger than our entire population."

But "when you start getting wealth, you start demanding better nutrition and better food," he said. "And so demand is high, and that causes the price to go up."

Overnight, Indians reacted with outrage at what they saw as a suggestion that they were to blame for inflation. Politicians lashed out at Bush. Newspapers excoriated him.

"India is not a net food importer. It is a food exporter. The assumption that prices are increasing because of a changed India is completely erroneous," said Manish Tewari, a spokesman for the ruling Congress party.

Let's take a moment to ponder this. The food crisis in India and most of the Third World is not due to their growing middle classes. It's because they are food exporters. Which leads us to ask : Why would a food exporting country not have enough food for their own people?

The answer is in volume and prices.

There's the farm subsidies that keep US agricultural production costs artificially low. Since most of US agribusiness is in the hands of a few corporations, they get to manipulate prices (legally or not) to maximize profits. There's of course, over-consumption at the end-point of US consumers who annually end up throwing away 27% of food produced worldwide.

Artificial demand for cheap, non-competitive imported food is what has countries like India on the brink. Their farmers have to maximize yields in order to compensate for the inability to raise prices. By the way, the US's price gouging of it's own agribusiness is not the only problem. There's also the fact that many agricultural industries around the world are being cannibalized by the likes of Monsanto and Cargill.

Remember when mothers used to guilt their kids into eating because there were kids starving in Ethiopia?

I never understood the logic about that one : Stuff your face with food because their people dying of famine in Africa. Well now we know why they're dying of famine: It's exactly because we are stuffing our faces, pockets and landfills with food.