An op-ed in Tuesday’s IHT offers an interesting perspective on the surge in world food prices. Author Robert Paarlberg points out that the hunger crisis was brewing long before food prices shot up.

Rising prices are having the harshest impact on urban populations, which are traditionally better off than their rural counterparts and rely on international markets for food. In cities across the developing world, rising prices are forcing people to reduce spending on things like gas and health care in order to feed their families.

The true epicenter of the hunger crisis is in rural areas, where poverty levels are much higher and subsistence agriculture is the main source of employment. Paarlberg argues that hunger here depends less on international food prices and more on agricultural productivity. He writes,

Africa’s food crisis grows primarily out of the low productivity, year in and year out, of the 60 percent of all Africans who plant crops and graze animals for a living… The average African smallholder farmer is a woman who has no improved seeds, no nitrogen fertilizers, no irrigation and no veterinary medicine for her animals. Her crop yields are only one third as high as in the developing countries of Asia, and her average income is only $1 a day.