The food crisis of 2008 "is a silent tsunami" says one World Food Program expert. Meaning instead of being localized like food problems tend to be, this one is widespread and causing riots worldwide. Depending on a family's income, they may be forced to give up health care, education for their children, meat, vegetables or even full meals, all dependent on the severity of the situation. For the approximately one billion people that survive on $1 per day, one bowl of food each day is just barely manageable, and if the cost of food goes up 20 percent, 100 million more could drop to this level.

Rich countries need to take the food problems as seriously as they take the credit crunch. Already bigwigs at the World Bank and the United Nations are calling for a “new deal” for food. Their clamour is justified. But getting the right kind of help is not so easy, partly because food is not a one-solution-fits-all problem and partly because some of the help needed now risks making matters worse in the long run.

The starting-point should be that rising food prices bear more heavily on some places than others. Food exporters, and countries where farmers are self-sufficient, or net sellers, benefit. Some countries—those in West Africa which import their staples, or Bangladesh, with its huge numbers of landless labourers—risk ruin and civil strife. Because of the severity there, the first step must be to mend the holes in the world's safety net. That means financing the World Food Programme properly. The WFP is the world's largest distributor of food aid and its most important barrier between hungry people and starvation. Like a $1-a-day family in a developing country, its purchasing power has been slashed by the rising cost of grain. Merely to distribute the same amount of food as last year, the WFP needs—and should get—an extra $700m.

In general, governments ought to liberalise markets, not intervene in them further. Food is riddled with state intervention at every turn, from subsidies to millers for cheap bread to bribes for farmers to leave land fallow. The upshot of such quotas, subsidies and controls is to dump all the imbalances that in another business might be smoothed out through small adjustments onto the one unregulated part of the food chain: the international market.

For decades, this produced low world prices and disincentives to poor farmers. Now, the opposite is happening. As a result of yet another government distortion—this time subsidies to biofuels in the rich world—prices have gone through the roof. Governments have further exaggerated the problem by imposing export quotas and trade restrictions, raising prices again. In the past, the main argument for liberalising farming was that it would raise food prices and boost returns to farmers. Now that prices have massively overshot, the argument stands for the opposite reason: liberalisation would reduce prices, while leaving farmers with a decent living.

Agriculture is now in limbo. The world of cheap food has gone. With luck and good policy, there will be a new equilibrium. The transition from one to the other is proving more costly and painful than anyone had expected. But the change is desirable, and governments should be seeking to ease the pain of transition, not to stop the process itself.

The words "food crisis" definitely impose a sense of fear, but admittedly (and frustratingly enough) the situation doesn't really feel like its hitting home yet. Yes, in North America some people are being limited to the amount of rice they can buy at Costco and some experts are advising we start stockpiling food, but really what does this crisis mean for the average North American? That we have to tighten our belts and hold off on buying that plasma TV we've had our eye on to create extra some extra room in the budget for more expensive food? Whereas to someone in Haiti, it may mean deciding if they can afford rice for even one meal each day or if they'll have to resort to eating dirt cookies just to get by.

» Economist