There is something worse than having one GFC. That's having two. Amid the international response to the global financial crisis, many people have stopped talking about the other GFC: the global food crisis.
It is still with us and not hard to find, from food prices in supermarkets worldwide to hunger in the Pacific, Asia and Africa. There were food riots in Africa and South-East Asia this year, and the crisis was linked to the fall of the Haitian government. Unless its causes are dealt with, it will worsen in the years to come.
Those causes are not well understood. The view that it is simply because biofuels use food for fuel is wrong.
Biofuels policies may have made us reach the crisis more quickly but the long-term trends have shown that food demand has been catching up with supply over many years.
The reasons include the growing world population and lower average harvests affected by climate change.
The good news story that much of the developing world is becoming wealthier has brought new challenges. As people become richer, they demand more meat. This causes farmers to shift from cropping to grazing and producing food for livestock and people.
As many developing nations modernise their economies, the agriculture sector tends to come last, meaning countries undergoing massive urban expansion still practise subsistence agriculture.
This is the world's challenge: to produce more food, while combating climate change, dealing with increasing water scarcity and coping with the financial crisis.
This will be front-of-mind when the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation gathers this week in Rome.
As you would expect, none of the simple answers work.
Reversing biofuels policies in some parts of the world is not sufficient to offset long-term pressures on food supply. On its own, aid won't do the trick either. When aid is cash or food supplies, it can be counterproductive, causing the local market to crash and wipe out the livelihoods of local farmers.
The crisis carries humanitarian responsibility and economic opportunity for food-exporting nations such as Australia. We need to respond in three ways: aid, technology transfer and increasing our productivity.
The Government has allocated over $100 million to improving global food security, including to the World Food Programme's emergency appeal.
Then you have the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, which fits the adage of teaching people to fish to feed them for a lifetime. By sending agricultural experts to nations such as East Timor and Vietnam, Australia is helping the poorest nations to come closer to feeding their own populations.
But the crisis is not only felt in developing nations. We've been seeing the effect at our checkout counters for many months. According to the FAO's Food Price Index, world food prices fell by 6 per cent in September, but were still 51 per cent higher than they were two years ago.
This drives home the pressures that pensioners, carers and working families started facing well before the global financial crisis hit.
The hardest part of the response is to produce more food. Much of our nation remains in its longest and deepest drought, and farm costs such as chemical, fertiliser and fuel have soared.
We need to do more to get our research and development from the lab to the farm, and find synergies between the pressures of climate change and increasing productivity.
Given the challenges the world faces, we cannot ignore the potential of genetically modified organisms. It has always been a sensitive issue and, as with all food technology, food-safety issues are paramount. While food safety may be a reason to ultimately reject particular plants, it is not a reason to reject the science of genetic modification.
When India switched to genetically modified cotton, it increased productivity by 75 per cent in four years. It went from a net importer of cotton to the world's second-largest exporter.
None of us know if such gains will come from other crops, but ignoring the potential of genetic modification puts superstition ahead of science.
It will be some time before the end of either GFC. But the decisions we take now, as a nation and as a planet, will affect the prosperity and livelihoods of all the world's citizens for decades to come.
Tony Burke is the federal Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry.
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