With the Prime Minister of Haiti having been voted out as a result of the recent food riots, expect biofuels to get put on the backburner for a while – at least as far as the government is concerned.   The new Prime Minister will need to assemble a new Cabinet and we hope that the Ministers of Finance, Agriculture, and Energy will all take a close look at the potential of biofuels.  In the meantime, the non-governmental organizations keep working away.  A successful war on poverty in Haiti must be fought on different fronts at the same time, chief of which are food security and energy independence.

Josette Sheeran, the Executive Director of the World Food Programme (WFP), spoke this week at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on “The Silent Tsunami" of hunger that threatens to push 100,000,000 more individuals into extreme poverty.  You can imagine that Haiti came up several times during her presentation.  Haitians are resilient people but soaring costs of food prices (and the subsequent increase in percentage of household income spent on food) is pushing people to their limits.  As Ms. Sheeran noted, “The difference between civilization and anarchy is seven meals.”   Hunger is a global problem and we do not have the option of not responding.

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