<quote> food supplies are failing because the European Union and the United Nations have pursued a 20-year policy of retiring land from production to arrest the fall in farm prices.
Engineering the retirement of farmland is largely a way of easing small farmers (who had been protected under the old Common Agricultural Policy) out of farming altogether. It has not hurt the larger agribusinesses, which are thriving. Not surprisingly, farm goods are a target for speculators, like '70s corporate raider, Jim Slater, whose new Agra Firma was started up to take advantage of booming prices. The reduction in excess output has in the last few years pushed prices up again, after long decades of falling food prices. In Italy, consumers boycotted pasta because prices rose so high; in Mexico, Tortilla Rallies protested against price rises, and in India there have been onion demonstrations. The Economist estimates that food prices rose by one third in the year to December 2007 (having fallen by three quarters between 1975 and 2005). According to the mainstream media, the pressure of biofuels and global warming are to blame for the shortfall in crops - as if governments had not been involved in a twenty-year programme of retiring land from production. Today's scarcities have been engineered, in the name of saving the environment, but in fact to defend the livelihoods of big agriculture. <endquote>
http://www.metamute.org/en/manufactured-scarcity-the-profits-of-deindustrialisation