Me, Joseph, and the Technicolour Coat

Friends often tolerate my "consumer" rant, about how we spend, spend, spend and let tomorrow take care of itself. They also tolerate my comparing our current consumer times to Joseph and his dream interpretation of the seven fat calves and the seven lean ones.

An article I saw today reminded me exactly of the pharaoh's dream:
WORLD LEADERS assemble in Rome today for a three-day summit on the global food crisis. The sense of urgency surrounding the meeting is appropriate. With commodity prices at their highest levels in three decades, some 100 million people who had been lifted out of chronic poverty are at risk of slipping back. Famine once again threatens vulnerable countries such as North Korea. Until relatively recently, producing more food was not thought to be much of a problem.

The real problem was lack of foresight and preparation:
During the era of cheap and abundant food, Western donors and multilateral aid organizations neglected agricultural research and rural development in favor of more fashionable development trends.

Things haven't changed much in the last three, four thousand years.