It is hard, in fact, to see what else WFP could have done. A big purchase of $22.5m was made from Glencore in July, which is when famine was declared in the Horn of Africa.

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The problem is that humanitarian aid is typically hand to mouth and last minute, which forces agencies to buy on international markets at their peak, as Chatham House fellow Rob Bailey points out. What is needed is for donors to look further ahead and cough up money in time. At the moment, WFP has a $150m revolving fund with which it is allowed to buy ahead to anticipate crises, small stuff compared with the $1.23bn total it needed to feed the starving in 2011. It would be good, too, if its programme to buy from small farmers locally and improve storage capacity in poorer countries were bigger.

To me it seems it's all been muddled in true aid-inudstrial complex style, where it's about being "nice" without thinking of the consequences. And indeed, the PR trick works, with the media catching on the "evil big corporation angle" so popular amoing fasionable leftists who have no idea what the role of corporations actually are, only that they are evil. Then they head out shopping "chic" goods from those very same corporations.

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.