It seems the world is back on hunger. Wasn’t it back in the early 1980’s when this was the issue du jour? Now, for very different reasons, the price of food is soaring and many in poor countries may starve again.

Advocacy organizations on the issue are already sprouting up online, one of the best being, www.ProjectConcern.org. The news media too has finally caught up to the long overdue story about how pumping corn into gas tanks is going to wreak havoc somewhere else in the food chain. By my estimate, these stories are about 8 to 12 months behind the curve, proving the old truism in journalism that trends, like interest rate cuts, take a few months to work their way into the mainstream.

The food crisis story is this year’s big story, in the way private equity, and the very entertaining robber baron subthemes which were part of that narrative, was the big story in 2007. We can blame the current situation on a lot of factors, but what is most interesting has been the way that the UN – led by a much more capable Sec-Gen in Ban Ki-Moon than Kofi Annan – has quickly jumped into a time machine and dusted off farming practices from the time of Jesus Christ as solutions on how to feed 6.6 billion people. Their biggest strategy seems to revolve around crop rotation.

It is surprising that so few people are talking about using science – for example genetically modified foods and other advanced methods to cheat mother nature – as a way to sidestep the soaring cost of fertilizer, let alone the scarcity of fertilizer and the all powerful U.S. farm lobby, which will doubtful abandon its efforts to convert the American Midwest into the ethanol epicenter of the world.

As Norm Borlaug has said, feeding 6 billion people is quite a challenge, and tough to do without science, let alone fertilizer. Whatever forces will hire up their lobbyists and public relations firms, they would be well advised to stoke some supply side solutions rather than clamor for stockpiling rice.