Food Frenzy

Throughout the history of the world, food has been a main issue for everyone. The start of what we consider to be the "modern world food system" began in Britain. During the 18th century tea was a hot commodity for many of the wealthy in Britain, but the tea along with the sugar and milk were not being produced in Europe, so they began to look for ways in which to get these imported to their country. Which lead to the innovation of the plantation, and the triangular trade came into effect. Sugar would be imported to Europe, slaves would be taken to the United States, and rum and other goods would be taken to Africa.

 This caused many problems across the world, but led many countries to the top of the food trading industry such as the United States. This was the beginning of a never ending battle of international trade.
Two centuries later, we see that many farm families were in desperate need of food because they were producing food for others, but they were not being paid enough to provide food for their own families. This lead to the idea of Rhodes' Conundrum. Rhodes' Conundrum is the idea that (1) the poor are many, and growing in number, (2) there is not enough food to feed them all, (3) if there is not enough food to feed them, they will go hungry, (4) if they go hungry, there will be civil war, and (5) other countries have enough food to feed them.  Rhodes' believed in order to prevent civil war, they would need to rely on other countries to import their food. This lead to food being an important political power at the end of World War II.
At the end of World War II, the United States had an abundance of food, while many other countries in the world were struggling to put food on the table for their people. This gave birth to the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan was set forth by by President Truman soon after the end of the war. The Marshall Plan was a US trade program in which the United States would aid those countries in Europe by transferring food to these countries.  This lead to the food trade being an important to the US foreign policy. Later we see that food is being traded from the US for oil. This was the beginning to many of the problems we have today with hunger in America.
We have traded so many different crops across different countries over the centuries to help with their hunger problem that we have began to increase the number of hungry people we have here in the Untied States because the government cannot help these people as much as we should be able to because the food trading is central to our foreign trade agreement. Is there any way that these countries we have helped in the past with their food shortages to now help the United States in our time of need?

Sources:
"Marshall Plan." History.com. A&E Television Networks, n.d. Web. 30 Jan. 2015

 Patel, Raj. Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World Food System. London: Portobello, 2007. Print.