The World

I went to a couple of meetings this week where the food crisis was discussed. At Chatham House on Monday John Holmes, the UN’s co-ordinator for emeregency relief, gave a careful and under-stated presentation -which was still alarming in its implications. He told me after the meeting that he thinks that we are still only at the beginning of the food crisis – and that prices and hunger are likely to keep rising for a while yet.

I’ve certainly noticed on my travels that food prices are now a big political issue in almost every country that I visit. I first noticed it on a trip to Pakistan and Bangladesh at the beginning of the year. In both countries, people told me that the biggest source of popular discontent were not the machinations of President Musharraf or the Bangladeshi interim government. It was the fact that the price of staple foods had gone up by as much as 40% over the last year.

You are now hearing similar complaints in richer parts of the world. President Saakashvili of Georgia blames some of the popular discontent aimed at his government on food prices. President Sarkozy of France made the same point in his television interview last week. And now it is the turn of the Labour Party in Britain to speculate over whether their electoral drubbing has something to do with the rising price of food and energy.

More expensive food is irksome and worrrying for people in Britain or France. But – obviously -it can be a matter of life-and-death in poorer parts of the world. Yesterday at the LSE I saw Jeff Sachs in action for the first time. Sachs is Mr Poverty Relief – and he is also a very effective (and unstoppable) public speaker. I have rarely seen an academic who is able to talk fluently for over an hour – without notes – and completely hold the attention of a group of students.

Of course, most of Sachs’s message is highly congenial to the average LSE student: there should be more foreign aid, President Bush is an evil moron, markets will not fix poverty, the war in Iraq was about oil, action on climate change is urgent. But Sachs’s appeal is about more than just his message. His combination of passion, high intelligence, energy and egotism is compelling. He managed inadvertently to make me feel faintly guilty with a long riff about how world-weary cynicism is the soft option. His latest book “Common Wealth” is – by contrast – suffused with optimism that the world can fix everything from global warming to global poverty.

Fortunately, the food crisis is not so severe that it stopped the LSE from giving Prof Sachs dinner after his speech. But the Sachs who shows up for dinner is not really that different from the man who performs on a public platform: passionate, energetic and convinced of his own rectitude.