The watchword of the EU parliament should be boldness

Two items of news in particular caught my eye this week. One, of course, was the World Food Summit in Rome, where world leaders assembled this week in the face of the mounting shortages and savage price that have struck food markets, almost out of the blue.

The Director of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, the Senegalese Dr Jacques Diouf, says that the value of food aid has fallen by almost 60 per cent in real terms since 1980. Some 20 billion euros, each year, about ten time...