Knee-jerk responses to rising food costs sighted in the wild:
Leading rice, wheat and soyabean exporters such as Argentina, Vietnam and Russia have restricted their foreign sales, triggering concerns among importing countries about food supply security.
Governments across the developing world are scrambling to boost farm imports and restrict exports in an attempt to forestall rising food prices and social unrest.
Should food prices continue to rise, we'll next see poorer governments nationalize food production for redistribution as gov't food programs become too expensive to maintain. This will reduce the incentive to grow edible, seizable crops and instead farmers will seek to produce hidden, high-value crops like narcotics.
Governments should choose the alternative of nationalizing narcotics production and use the proceeds of international sales to support food programs while affirming farmers' land and choice rights, and removing barriers to trade in basic foods.
As a parting thought, in the US, when we run a census, we count the number of households and household members. In China, when they run a census, they count the number of mouths.*
* renkou = population; ren2 = person, kou3 = mouth.