It's clear that one cause of the current food crisis is that poorer countries have been pressured into dismantling their food policies, leaving peasant farmers and eaters alike to bear all the risks of the extremely volatile world market. This has left corporations free to ship factory-farmed food to those countries, peasants free to migrate to urban slums, and corporately-dominated economic markets free to ignore those starving.

And we should blame ourselves, not the corporations. Expecting a corporation to give affordable loans to farmers, look out for the urban poor, and cut carbon emissions - unless those are the most profitable things it can do, which they aren't - is like expecting your kitchen stove to go out and join the Missionaries of Charity. (The difference is that, if your stove were a corporation, it would hire lobbyists to make sure that federal policies heavily favored stoves over toasters and George Foreman grills).

But many of the powers that be refuse to admit that our current trade model is a problem; so some are demanding that we respond to the crisis by drinking more corporate-trade Kool-Aid (by extending reach of the WTO, for example). In a move that clearly shows they are lost to common sense, such arguments often blame the food crisis on the only significant farm policy left on the planet: rich-country subsidies for food crops. For example, a story last week announced that U.N. head Ban Ki-moon had asked the world to respond to the crisis by "cut[ting] agricultural subsidies, particularly in developed countries."

Now, there are lots of reasons why U.S. farm subsidies, which push the export-driven factory-farming model, are broken and need to be radically reworked. (And, of course, subsidies for ethanol production, which converts food to fuel, really do drive up the price of food and are a huge problem).

But the crisis is that food prices have become way too high. Subsidies to food crops inherently lower food prices. You do the math.

I believe the underlying argument is that subsidies have dampened "market signals"--i.e., rising prices--that would otherwise have caused farmers to gradually increase production. But, as you may have noticed at the gas pump, some key farm inputs, like fuel and fossil-fuel-based fertilizer, have been anything but gradual in their price rise. On top of genuine supply and demand spikes, there's the still-more-volatile behavior of financial speculators.

And, on a more basic level, farmers often are unable to respond to price increases. In particular, small farmers in the global South don't have access to affordable loans, supplies, or marketing they would need to grow more.

Why? Because poor countries have dismantled most of their food policies as trade agreements decimated the government policy toolbox, and IMF pressure forced many governments to slash their farm investment. Now, there are belated calls for governments in the Global South to invest in farming once again. Amen to that.

Elizabeth Palmberg is an assistant editor of Sojourners.

"Grain Markets Panic Buying, Export Controls, and Food Riots," trumpets the headline of one Web site I read while researching the world food price crisis for Sojourners' July issue. Was the site a moral critique of how our corporation-driven, anything-goes global economy has caused the cost of food to skyrocket, driving 100 million people into poverty?

Actually, the "food riots" headline is geared to telling people how to profit from others' suffering. The next sentence reads: "Long-term global demand and supply trends in the agricultural sector remain very favorable for investors." Morally repugnant as that segue is, the real problem is that speculation probably helped cause the food price crisis (in concert with other factors such as agrofuel production, rising meat-eating, and the gutting of poor-country farm policy).

Speculative markets are innately prone to stampedes, as we can see from the mortgage bubble, the dot.com bubble, etc., etc. Wild price swings are built into the system: It's the job of a money manager to buy commodities that will go up (helping to inflate bubbles) and sell them when they start to go down (helping deflate them).

Turning up the speculative heat is the fact that there's a LOT of money out there chasing investments -- double what there was in the year 2000. A recent NPR program, The Giant Pool of Money, spells out, in human terms, how the pressure that speculative money exerts was a recipe for disaster during the housing bubble.

While that bubble hurt homeowners and investors when prices deflated, food-market speculation hurts the world's poor as prices go up -- way, way up. Incredibly, many voices in the press fly in the face of reality by arguing that speculation somehow decreases the wild swings and bubble pricing of markets. For example, The New York Times recently argued that

... the more money that speculators are willing to put to work in the market, the more liquid it is and the easier it is to buy and sell without causing big ripples in prices.

If you believe that stampedes calm vibrations, I've got some subprime mortgage-backed securities to sell you. A more accurate description of how speculators act can be found in Washington Post humorist Gene Weingarten's interview several years ago with Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow:

[Weingarten]: ... would it be your professional judgment that Wall Street, the principal bulwark of the American financial system, is at the mercy of persons with the maturity of kindergarteners -- or of preschoolers?

Solow: It's at the mercy of very, very nervous people.

Now, the world's poor are more than nervous. They're hungry. Very hungry.

Elizabeth Palmberg is an assistant editor of Sojourners.

In college, I took a cultural exchange trip (read: vacation) to Rome over spring break. Just around the corner from St. Peter's Square, I bought my father, a minister, a crucifix for his office.

Earlier this week, I saw that same souvenir in a report from The National Labor Committee on crucifixes made in Chinese sweatshops.

The report, titled "Today Workers Bear the Cross", documents the oppressive treatment of the workers in the Junxingye factory in Dongguan, China, who make crucifixes and other religious items to be sold to the faithful in the West.

[The] mostly young women—several just 15 and 16 years old—[are] forced to work routine 14 to 15 ½-hour shifts, from 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 or 11:30 p.m., seven days a week … and even monthly all-night 22 ½ to 25-hour shifts before shipments must leave for the U.S. …Workers are paid just 26 and a half cents an hour, which is half of China's legal minimum wage (already set at a below-subsistence level) of 55 cents an hour. After fees deducted for room and board, the workers take-home wage can drop to just nine cents an hour … Workers fear that they may be handling toxic chemicals, but they are not told the names of the chemicals and paints, let alone their potential health hazards.

The products are then sold for upwards of $20 in the U.S., in churches like New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral and chains like Family Christian Stores. If God despises praise songs and offerings presented in the absence of justice, as the Hebrew prophets tell us, then crucifixes and plastic Bible covers made on the cheap at the expense of workers must really make God mad.

The image of women toiling away in sweatshops while handling an icon of the suffering body of Christ is quite striking. It brings to my mind a couple of questions. What might it mean for North American and European Christians to bear the cross—that is, to willingly suffer for the sake of justice—rather than participate in the unjust elements of our global trade system? Is it even possible to practice authentic discipleship within the global economy we're all swept up in? How can we, in even the smallest ways, seek to rid our lives of exploitation and be in solidarity with those who are suffering?

I ask these questions not because I have the answers. (Much of this post was written on a laptop built in, you guessed it, China.) I think I have a small picture, though, of what it might look like:

We'd probably buy more local and union made products, even if they cost more. We'd become pretty comfortable with hand-me-downs, and even looking kind of frumpy sometimes. We'd realize we need less than we thought we did, and go without some things previously thought essential. We'd share a lot more with our neighbors. And we'd demand that unjust structures change. Most of all, we'd need a community—to keep us accountable to countercultural discipleship, to forgive us for the impossibility of living lives free of exploitation, and to remind us it is in God and not the global market that we live, move, and have our being.

I pray that the church would be that sort of community and come together in resistance to our present global economy. Then we could begin to free ourselves (and others, like the women in the Junxingye factory) from its captivity.

Tim Kumfer serves as an assistant at The Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C., and is a former Sojourners intern. He writes occasionally at timkumfer.blogspot.com.