so they can acquire the manna to restore the island .. I mean planet.

As food prices increase and as the food available per person decreases the poor will starve to death.  And there ain't no way to increase food production.  In fact, total food production in the US and the world has reached maximum and has started to fall:  rice production in the Sacramento Valley, the salting of fields in the California Central Valley, the areas dependent on the depleting Ogallala Aquifer, the loss of topsoil in the US Midwest, the prospects of a fertilizer shortage,the collapse of the cod fisheries, and the threatened collapse of the tuna  and salmon fisheries as well.  This is a crises in food production such that many countries (pdf!) can no longer afford to purchase food, and they can't grow enough on their own to feed their population.

We live on an island in space

and just like the Eastern Islanders the human race is dependent on what the island can provide.  We can, like the Eastern Islanders, continue to build our little statues with the red top hats until the whole thing crashes or we can start doing what needs to be done to bring the population under control and move to a sustainable lifestyle.

Make no mistake, the population WILL fall over the rest of this century.  The question is the means and procedures by and through which it happens.

If NBBooks is correct, and the Ruling Class attempts to inflate their way out of the financial crises, the Third World will explode.  Inflating the currency means an increase in the price of food costed in that currency.  The Third World is already having difficulty buying the food they need.  Increasing the costs means pricing it out of their reach. People don't quietly sit down and starve to death.  They riot, revolt, migrate, take whatever they can to raise food or raise the money to buy the food they need.  

We're not immune to this crises.  One of the things they can steal are the mines, oil fields, and the other natural resources the First World depends upon for our industrial civilization.  

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

Across Egypt this year, people have waited in line for hours at bakeries that sell government-subsidized bread, sign of a growing crisis over the primary foodstuff in the Arab world's most populous country. President Hosni Mubarak has ordered Egypt's army to bake bread for the public, following the deaths of at least six people since March 17 -- some succumbing to exhaustion during the long waits, others stabbed in vicious struggles for places in line.

Similarly, rice crisis comes to Philipines, food concerns everywhere.

I genuinely fear that the first will be the scariest when China starves within the next decade. Equally I fear that the UK is vulnerable because the economic structure has become entirely divorced from agricultural production. Too many people who will be economically unproductive without oil in places where food isn't and no good way to re-adjust that fact.

There are possible solutions, but I doubt they will allow more than a general deflation, we cannot go on growing population which is gonna piss off a lot of religious groups.

We could lose a couple of billion over a timescale of 10 - 50 years which is going to make political stability a commodity hard to find.

keep to the Fen Causeway

But (as I've also said) mass starvation is not inevitable:  it's only inevitable if we go on doing things the industrial-capitalist way, where the purpose of life and civilisation is to generate wealth for an accumulator elite.  If the purpose of civilisation was to feed and clothe and house people, we could feed and clothe and house people -- even the numbers of people alive today.  But we would rather fight wars, build obscene monuments to our own cleverness and "wealth" (yes, moai) and wallow in dreams of supra-pharaonic luxury... while we teeter on the edge of biotic bankruptcy, yada yada.

The most "efficient" (in terms of external resources) way to cultivate food is intensive polyculture.  But that requires intensive human involvement and expertise, local knowledge, skill, and the distributed custodianship of land by the people (not its concentrated private ownership by a tiny band of absentee overlords).  Yields per acre with intensive polyculture and biotic (non-petroleum, nutrient-recycling) methods are well documented as higher than industrial ag yields per acre -- especially if we count the (documented) higher nutritional value of biotically-grown food and the (documented) accumulation rather than liquidation of topsoil, and the greatly reduced "need" for irrigation (relieving the pressure on another precious resource, fresh water).  But intensive polyculture flies directly in the face of a century of Taylorism and the centralisation of power and authority that Taylorism both promotes and enables;  and it flies in the face of technomanagerial hubris w/its rather campy fantasies of totalising control and the "rationalisation" of all productive activity.

We are at a juncture, like many civilisations before us, where the maintenance of power and authority by the elite, and the core civilisational myths which legitimise that elite, are directly at odds with the survival of the masses and of the civilisation itself.  We know from the historical record that our chances of doing the smart thing and changing course in time to avert a serious trainwreck are -- what -- not quite so good as 50/50?

I don't know which is worse ... an inevitable Doom rolling down on us, majestic and terrifying and fateful -- or the maddening sense that there is nothing inevitable about it at all, that it's merely stubbornness, pride, greed and petty-power-madness (the Four Horsemen of civilisational collapse) that prevent us from exercising our clever-monkey adaptibility and common sense and dodging the cannonball.

Meanwhile, there's a lot of speculation (in the financial sense) going on in the ag sector, as the finance capitalists who got burned in the subprime crash and real estate bubble take their government handouts and go play in a new marketplace:  staple foods.  This speculation is helping to create a "food bubble", aided by the genuine drawdown of essential food producing resources (such as fresh water, viable topsoil, unpaved acreage, and stable weather).  Genuine supply failures combined with aggressive speculative profiteering:  recipe for disaster.

I have long thought that we need a two-economy (at least) model, in which certain basic goods are not available for speculative investment.  This has worked before for other cultures and could work again...  Basic foods, basic clothing, baseline shelter, basic (village doctor) medical care, should not be subject to profiteering (aka economic blackmail).  Luxury goods and/or imported goods might be left available as a speculative playground, but in a separate currency (so that speculative booms and busts don't touch the subsistence or household economy).  iirc Tainter documents this practise in one or more S American traditional cultures:  two currencies, two sets of business rules, to provide a separation between a stable economy of necessities and a risky/aggressive economy of luxuries.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

From the first link, it is worth noting:

Freedom from Corruption - 18%

Corruption is perceived as rampant. Haiti ranks 163rd out of 163 countries in Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index for 2006. Haiti's reputation as one of the world's most corrupt countries is a major impediment to doing business. Customs officers often demand bribes to clear shipments. Smuggling is a major problem, and contraband accounts for a large percentage of the manufactured consumables market.

I've believed for several years that the US would eventually be forced to inflate the dollar. As I see it, they really had no other choice. They either had to let the money pipes run dry, or else fill them up with newly printed (that is, loaned) dollars.

And letting the pipes run dry here in the US, even for a few days or weeks, would cause trading halts, many bankruptcies, bank closures, an effective halt on real estate sales, and so forth. The result, and quickly, would be that no one could transact much business, except for barter. Trucks might even stop moving for a time, messing up the flow of goods, including food.

That scenario is just too disruptive. Of course our "leaders" will continue to cave to the most obvious short-term fixes, because that is how our system is structured now.

What surprises me is the quick appearance of these widespread, almost synchronized food riots. It's true that in theory, food should be the next problem, but I thought that would begin slowly with sporadic trouble in various places, followed by government intervention, rationing, feeding stations and so forth. It didn't occur to me that even before actual shortages appeared, food would become too expensive for most people (globally) to afford.

If this is what "demand destruction" looks like at $110 per barrel, I conclude that the world is going to be changing faster and sooner than even the pessimists expected.