It’s not easy to find any silver lining in the dark cloud of spiraling food costs and hunger that hangs over the world’s poor. But there is some good news for Americans in the global food crisis.

The United States may have been a significant part of the problem — with its annual $6 billion in subsidies to produce ethanol from corn. But the United States is also almost certain to be part of the solution because it is to food what Saudi Arabia is to oil: the swing producer that can most easily and swiftly increase the world’s food supply.

The United States remains the world’s breadbasket. It produces slightly more than 30 percent of the world’s wheat exports, about 70 percent of the world’s corn exports and close to 40 percent of its soybean exports. Food exports, at nearly $70 billion, are one of the biggest earners from foreign trade, well ahead of chemicals or general machinery or aircraft.

Among the biggest export markets for American foodstuffs, after Canada and Mexico, are the Middle Eastern and African oil producers. Just as American motorists have been fuming at the higher gas prices, Saudi and Nigerian and Iraqi and Mexican customers have been complaining about the higher prices they are paying to eat.

There is a symmetry here. Modern food production is energy intensive, starting with the fertilizer. It takes 33,500 cubic feet of natural gas to make one ton of anhydrous ammonia fertilizer. It takes fuel to plough the fields, to sow and weed and harvest the crop and take it to market. So the more Americans pay for oil, the more Arabs and Africans pay for food.

The irony is that prices for wheat, coarse grains like corn and rice are all soaring, even though world crops are at record highs. The U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization, or FAO, reckons that this year’s total world cereal crop will be 2,164 million tons, up 2.6 percent from last year’s total, which was the previous record.

The problem is that the world is consuming more cereals than it produces — partly because of more mouths to feed, partly because of the ever-increasing demands of livestock as countries like China clamber up the protein chain from rice to hamburgers. It takes 7 pounds of cereal to produce one pound of beef. About 750 million tons, over a third of the world’s cereal crop, goes to feed livestock. Humans eat only 1.006 million tons, less than half the total crop.

The other factor is the new fashion for biofuels, particularly in the U.S., which this year will use at least 81 million tons of corn to make ethanol — 37 percent more than last year. To put this in perspective, despite a sharp increase in wheat plantings, the U.S. will produce only 60 million tons of wheat this year.

But that flexibility of U.S. farmers to switch crops in response to market signals is the reason not to panic, despite grim news pictures of food riots in Haiti and Egypt and signs of panic in the Philippines.

Another reason not to panic is that last year’s exceptional weather, with droughts in the Ukraine and Australia, is unlikely to be repeated this year. The FAO sees the European Union producing a bumper 137 million tons of wheat this year, and Russia and Ukraine producing another 7 million tons.

There is, however, one big problem looming ahead in the world food industry. Unless the scientists get very lucky very soon, we shall soon all be hearing a lot more about something called Ug99. This is the name of a variant of the stem rust fungus, Puccinia graminis, that attacks wheat.

It was first identified in Uganda in 1999, hence the name. But this year it spread dramatically, its spores drifting on the wind across the Red Sea to Yemen and across the Persian Gulf to Iran.

The wheat stem rust, also known as wheat black rust, is capable of causing severe losses. It can destroy entire wheat fields. The FAO estimates that as much as 80 percent of all wheat varieties planted in Asia and Africa are susceptible to this new strain.

“Global wheat yields could be at risk if the stem rust spreads to major wheat-producing countries,” warns FAO Director-General Dr Jacques Diouf. “The fungus can spread rapidly and has the potential to cause global crop epidemics and wheat harvest losses of several billion dollars. This could lead to increased wheat prices and local or regional food shortages. Developing countries that are relying on wheat and do not have access to resistant varieties will be particularly hit.”

There are two big problems here. The first is that Ug99 has defeated the two main gene complexes, Sr 31 and Sr 24, that protect most wheat strains from stem rust. It appears to resist most fungicides. Stopping it may not be a foregone conclusion.

“Of the 50 genes we know for resistance to stem rust, only 10 work even partially against Ug99,” warns Rock Ward, leading the fight against it at the international Maize and Wheat Improvement Center.

The second problem is the nightmare scenario. Having jumped the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, it is not clear how Ug99 gets stopped before it heads east into Pakistan and India, and north into Russia, Ukraine and Europe.

“This thing has immense potential for social and human destruction,” says Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, now 93 and known as the father of the Green Revolution in agriculture. “We know what to do and how to do it. All we need are the financial resources, scientific cooperation and political will to contain this threat to world food security.”

If the worst happens, then in the short term the survival of much of the human race is likely to depend on the farmers of the Western hemisphere, led by the United States. If Ug99 does cross the oceans to these shores, the world’s last life-saving reserve could be the corn and soy and sorghum farmers of America.

Martin Walker, senior director of the Global Business Policy Council, is chief global affairs columnist for UPI, He is senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center and the author of “The Cold War: A History” and “Makers of the American Century.“

The old rule was that we were always shocked by what fascinated us the most. While big British scandals were about sex, big American scandals were about power.

But the country that bought us the ultimate power scandal of Watergate has turned remarkably British. From Gennifer Flowers to Paula Jones to Monica Lewinsky and now to the $1000-an-hour Kristen, the great American scandal need now concern merely those familiar sins of lust and adultery.

Even the prurient Brits never lowered the bar that far — requiring some extra moral spice beyond humping and hypocrisy. And until New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer became indelibly known as Client No. 9, the British held the all-time gold standard of a prostitution scandal. (It should be noted in passing that whatever the rights or wrongs of President Bill Clinton’s serial dalliances, nobody ever suggested that he actually paid cash for it.)

The Profumo scandal of 1963 was named after the secretary of state for war, John Profumo (memorably played by Sir Ian McKellen in the 1989 movie, “Scandal”). Though married to one of the most desirable and stylish women in London, the actress Valerie Hobson (who stood by him), Profumo developed an infatuation with a young call girl, Christine Keeler.

Profumo first saw the teenage nymph clambering naked from the swimming pool at Cliveden, the country house of Lord Astor. She was staying at a cottage on the estate with her mentor and pimp Stephen Ward, a society osteopath and gifted artist who did portraits of upper crust Brits, including Prince Philip, the Queen’s husband.)

Pretty, sexy and somewhat common in her speech and manners, Keeler was a good-time girl from a caravan site, the British equivalent of a trailer park. Unknown to Profumo, he was sharing her favors with the debonair actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr., a Jamaican petty gangster called Johnny Edgecombe and the Soviet military attache, Capt. Yevgeny Ivanov.

Rumors spread and the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, called in his war minister to ask if he was consorting with a prostitute. Profumo denied it, and then went before the House of Commons to repeat his denial. It was almost true. Unlike Spitzer, he did not pay for services rendered, but rather gave Keeler jewelry and expensive presents.

It was the gangster who blew the story, drunkenly demanding entrance to Keeler’s apartment and firing off a revolver in the street. He was arrested and the story began to unravel, with the country agog at the tales of high jinks in high places, sex in swimming polls and speculation – was Prince Philip involved?

The tone was set by the famous photo of Keeler, sitting naked with her legs enticingly spread around the back of the chair that kept her decent. The pose was re-enacted by Sarah Miles in the brilliant Joseph Losey movie, “The Servant,” made the year of the scandal.

It came in that curious period when Britannia was loosening her corsets to the music of the Beatles, just after a great censorship trial allowed the publication of D.H. Lawrence’s novel “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.” As the poet Philip Larkin recalled, it was the year “when sexual intercourse began,” or at least began to be discussed in the respectable newspapers and on the BBC.

But in that interesting and deeply hypocritical space between Puritanism and prurience that Anglo-Saxon societies like Britain and America often find themselves, the sexual scandal was not deemed to be central. The leader of the Labor Party opposition and later prime minister Harold Wilson told Parliament “this is not a moral issue” and focused instead on the security threat posed by Ivanov.

“It is a Moral Issue” thundered The Times editorial on the following day.

They were both wrong. What brought down Profumo was neither the sex nor the security, but the plain fact that he had lied to the House of Commons. And that is the key to the British scandal, the need to be high-minded about being high-handed in moral judgment.

So poor soon-to-be ex-Gov. Spitzer, with no security threat and no public lie to justify his agony, has now been destroyed for the sheer tawdriness of his lusts — or, in the British vernacular, getting it in the neck after paying through the nose for having it away with a bit on the side.

Unlike Profumo, whose scandals endured for months, or Clinton, whose baiting continued for more than a year, Spitzer has given us but a couple of days to revel in the delicious glee of seeing the witchfinder-in-chief stripped bare in his own hypocrisy. Exposed on a Monday, resigned on a Wednesday, it all went too fast to be seriously relished. That was Spitzer’s ultimate sin, to be a spoilsport.

Martin Walker, senior director of the Global Business Policy Council, is chief global affairs columnist for UPI, He is senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center and the author of “The Cold War: A History” and “Makers of the American Century.”

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) (WDCpix)

It is one of the ironies of this election year that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is likely to be the Democratic presidential nominee thanks in large part to his foreign policy — the area in which he had least experience and most vulnerabilities. The key to his campaign has been his early opposition to the war in Iraq, and his consequent ability to question the judgment of older and more experienced Democrats who had voted to authorize the use of military force.

Personalities aside, this was the distinguishing feature of the Obama campaign that made all else possible. It gave him special access to the El Dorado of today’s politics — the ability to raise $1 million and more a day in small donations over the Internet. It gave his campaign the foot soldiers and volunteers his excellent field organization required in the new mass of primary states. And it gave him the campus buzz that brought out an unprecedented youth vote.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

There have been three foreign policy issues that made some stir in the campaign, two of which defined clear differences between Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.). The first was on unilateral strikes inside Pakistan, the second on talking to America’s enemies.

In a speech last August on the need to focus more on counter-terrorist operations against the Taliban and on the war in Afghanistan, Obama vowed to be far more aggressive in demanding support from Pakistan and in taking military action.

“If we have actionable intelligence about high-value targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will,” he declared. The other Democratic candidates characterized this as naïve and Clinton chose to interpret the phrase as a ”threat to bomb Pakistan.”

In fact, as Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) noted, this has been the unstated U.S. policy for some time, as demonstrated by the use of a Hellfire missile launched from an unmanned Predator drone in January to attack and kill a high-ranking al-Qaeda leader, Abu Laith al-Libi. According to The New York Times, Predators are now stationed as a secret CIA base inside Pakistan.

In the same speech, Obama called for a marked shift in U.S. policy toward Cuba, including the lifting of travel and remittance restrictions. In an Miami Herald op-ed article, he then called for direct dialogue. He wrote that he was prepared to start bilateral talks to make it clear that the U.S. was prepared to open diplomatic relations if Cuba made clear steps toward “a democratic opening.”

Then, during a virtual debate organized by MoveOn.org, Obama stressed the need to talk to America’s enemies: “It’s absolutely critical that in concert with my proposal for a phased withdrawal from Iraq of American combat troops that we talk to the Syrians and the Iranians about playing a more constructive role in Iraq, and those who say we shouldn’t be talking to them ignore our own history. Ronald Reagan during the Cold War called the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire,’ but he consistently met with the Soviet Union because he recognized power without diplomacy is a prescription for disaster. So, I think we have to have serious conversations with them.”

This, too, Clinton labeled “naïve.” She said Obama under-estimated the symbolic importance of a president’s direct involvement in diplomacy. Obama did not back down, however, and went on to hail it as something that both distinguished him from Clinton and put him “ahead of the curve” in diplomacy.

“When I first said that there were these gasps and a bunch of the pundits wrote that this was a terrible gaffe and Hillary really put him in his place and this and that. And then they were shocked when I said the same thing the next day, and a week later and two weeks later,” Obama almost gleefully told New Hampshire voters in Exeter last December.

“Now I’m glad to see, now suddenly George Bush is writing letters to Kim Jung Ill, and North Korea,” Obama said. “So maybe I’m six months or nine months ahead of the curve. And I will keep on making these arguments and maybe other folks will decide they make sense.”

The differences here are symbolic rather than substantial. Clinton and Obama would both negotiate with America’s enemies and would both be ready to explore diplomatic openings, and would both be ready as president to enter the negotiations in person should acceptable conditions be agreed in advance.

The final foreign policy issue that has made a stir in this campaign is the North American Free Trade Agreement and the impact of free trade on U.S. jobs. This has now reached the point where the alarmed Canadian government has warned that U.S. access to Canada’s oil and gas could be at risk.

Obama and Clinton have simultaneously escalated their rhetoric on NAFTA, most powerfully ahead of the Ohio primary. Both are now demanding that the agreement be re-negotiated. Both said in their last TV debate that they would “opt out” of NAFTA unless it was modified to include job protection agreements.

Despite this common position, the sparring goes on. Obama has cited Clinton’s earlier support for NAFTA, both in her book and in speeches in the 1990s. Obama did, however, vote for the 2006 Free Trade agreement with Oman, and said he would support last year’s similar agreement with Peru.

It is an open question how far this demand for NAFTA’s re-negotiation would be taken should Obama become president. In 1992, Bill Clinton as a candidate was critical of the NAFTA negotiations unless adequate labor and environmental safeguards could be guaranteed. As president, he then split his party and worked with the Republicans to enact it.

With the glaring exception of their different position on the Iraq war in 2002, the differences between Hillary Clinton and Obama are more apparent than real. And Obama has never acknowledged one important fact of Clinton’s 2002 vote to authorize the use of force: Hans Blix, chairman of the U.N. inspection mission, said the vote was instrumental in re-opening the inspections in November 2002.

One issue that has not emerged directly in campaign debates but has been given some prominence in specialist media, has been the suspicion that Obama’s support of Israel is open to question. Articles in Commentary and The American Thinker have criticized the views of some of Obama’s advisers, notably Samantha Power.

Ali Abunimah, publisher of the pro-Palestinian website The Electronic Intifada, has written sadly of his meetings with Obama before his 2004 Senate campaign when he had strong sympathies for the Palestinians, and his increasingly pro-Israeli positions since. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has firmly established Obama’s pro-Israeli credentials, saying he “sounded as strong as Clinton, as supportive as Bush, as friendly as Giuliani.”

Like all of them, Obama stresses, “I do not believe that the military option should be ruled out” when it came to Iran, and “the world must prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.”

Above all, his foreign policy is rooted in the long tradition of American exceptionalism, American special destiny, American leadership and the conviction that “we must maintain the strongest, best-equipped military in the world.”

“I reject the notion that the American moment has passed,” he declared in his major foreign policy speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs last April. “ I still believe that America is the last best hope on earth. We just have to show the world why this is so.”

Martin Walker, senior director of the Global Business Policy Council, is chief global affairs columnist for UPI, He is senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center and the author of “The Cold War: A History” and “Makers of the American Century.“