A billion people will go to bed hungry tonight, 35 years after Henry Kissinger told the first world food conference in Rome that the planet was on the cusp of providing enough food for all its people. People who attended this year's United Nations Food Conference in Rome saw how horribly off-base Kissinger's prediction was. And it could get worse, according to a recent article in The Economist.

     There are plenty of technical problems to increasing the world's food supply to feed an expected nine billion people by the year 2050. How do we produce more food without more water (because there is no more water), and more land (there's almost no room for more cropland). 
     Complicating the sparsity of resources are the issues of climate change, political resistance to new technology - particularly genetically modified crops -  national protectionism and erratic markets.
     The food shortage nightmare isn't so much that people go to bed hungry, it's that too many of them don't wake up in the morning. To read The Economist article, go here   http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14915144
     
     While others my be confused by a public option for health insurance, the National Farmers Union is adamant in its support of the idea. Farmers are especially challenged by healthcare costs because they lack the group buying power of large employers. Farmers are also generally older and work in what insurance companies consider a hazardous occupation. Lancaster Farming regional edition editor Tracy Sutton sat in on an NFU teleconference last week on the health care issue, and prepared a report which you can read in our current issue. Or you can check it out here:  http://www.lancasterfarming.com/node/2402 
     
     Nanu meets Jaws. Awesome.  http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/killer-whale-attacks-great-white/26i337r7