This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, April 25, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Ethanol subsidies can be blamed for many things, but Indoor Koclani, author of the Cato Book,

The Improving State of the World,

says rising global food prices can't be entirely laid

at U.S. policymaker's feet.

One of the major improvements we've seen in the human well-being since the end of World War II

has been the fact that the number of hungry people around the world has actually declined despite the fact that the

population is much larger.

Just after the Second World War, there were a lot of fears that there would be massive famine and starvation around the world.

And there were books written about the fact that India and China were going to have massive starvation.

There was a book called Famine, for example.

It was written and it proclaimed,

essentially, the end of those societies for practical purposes.

But lo and behold that didn't happen. What happened was

societies started to produce more food.

This was helped by the fact that there was a lot of technological change.

The Green Revolution was taken to Asia and India and Bangladesh in particular adopted these and because the amount of food production went up, per capita, the prices came down.

From the 50s to the early 2000s, the price of food itself around. Now one of what had happened was when food prices came down it

allowed people who were unable to purchase food, the people at the bottom of

the economic ladder, they could now afford food.

And because of that, there were fewer and fewer people

...