To people of the West, it is cheese that matters. But to the rest of the world, it is rice.

To understand this very well in the American context, cheese is like football to Americans while rice is like soccer to the rest of the world.

So imagine what Americans will feel without football? It is what the rest of the world will feel if soccer disappears. That is what the world outside the West is feeling with the scarcity of rice.

Where has all the rice gone?

Some say it is drought. Australia said it lost 98% of its production due to drought. Others said it is China and India – just as they are sucking up all the oils of the world, they are eating up all the rice. If three billion people who eat rice once a day decides to eat rice twice a day because they are wealthier, the demand for rice will just double overnight.

I also heard that it must be the biofuel. Governments across the West are subsidizing biofuels and as such rice farmers are abandoning rice for grains like corn that can be used for biofuel.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is saying that global warming is reducing rainfall and making it variable. It warns that climate change leads to more extreme weather as well as increase in pests and weeds. As sea level changes so does rice production at the deltas of rivers across, Vietnam, Thailand and Bangladesh.

For those in the Third World country, with price of wheat and other grains already on the roof, it is not funny what is happening to rice. If it is a joke, someone should stop it right now.

Already there is riot in Ethiopia, Haiti, Indonesia, Senegal, Italy, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Thailand and Egypt. Producers like Hong Kong, Philippines and Indonesia are beginning to hoard rice.

Maybe it will be the first revolution to be carried on youtube.

I could hear the chorus in my head.

“All we can saying, give us our rice.”

And millions of peasants from across the world storm the streets of hundreds of cities, crawling on the ground, searching for grains.

They might be peasants but they know that in the name of open market, Western farms enjoying government subsidies flooded Third World markets. These farmers knocked out local producers with cheap and highly processed rice.

Growing up in the Third World, many eat rice every Sunday as their special meal. With the hike in price, it has been reduced to holiday meals – like Easter and Christmas. If this hike continues, there may be no rice for Christmas. If that happens, the poor people of the world will not be responsible for what they do.

Hungry people have no stake in sustainability, stability, sensibility and sanity. The scary thing is that they know where to point fingers when hunger comes.