The global commodity prices of basic staples such as grain, wheat and cereals has rocketed and the capital flight from a weakening dollar has found itself a safe haven in oil, food, and metals. Couple this with the growing demand by near- developed countries such as China and high-growth countries such as India, limited supply and with unpredictable weather conditions caused by Global warming, we have a perfect storm. A storm that could cause a large part of the world’s population to go hungry or have at best their living standards squashed to subsistence levels.

As is always the case in extreme circumstances, the poor and powerless are always the ones who face the worst, the unbelievable. I still struggle to comprehend the TV images of dead ‘poor’ people floating in flood water during the 2005 New Orleans floods. The devastation to hit Pakistan during the earthquake, killing nearly a million, was so destructive because it is a poor country, the cyclone that hit Burma and regularly floods Bangladesh, only proves that the people who suffer the least are the ones who consume the most. The enviable choice between buying a mango smoothie in mid winter or a skinny mocha-latte (what ever that is) is one that is denied to billions of people. And all of these, if they couldn’t have been avoided, could have at least been reduced by timely and effective human intervention.

It is our job as human beings, our obligation to those who do not have choices, to ensure that man does not enhance the effects of an already precarious living. This means that we need to look at where we (and in this case that means us, in the West), contribute to global poverty. Is globalisation a good thing? Is consumerism bad? How does a farm subsidy in the West affect farming in Africa? Has the logistical cost increased so much that no matter how much food is produced the cost of transportation will be prohibitive? And what can we do to reduce the effect of global warming, which means hotter and wetter summers for us in the UK but draught and starvation for hundreds of millions elsewhere?

The global estimated $1 trillion dollars extra spent by poor countries in 2008 for food isn’t an issue that other people need to worry about in the relative rich west; we can afford to be detached and sympathetic without fully understanding the consequence of hearing our children cry because they are hungry. We don’t have to spend months tilling a barren strip of land, only to find out whatever we produced to sell has been undercut by French farms who receive state aid, or finding soya oil is too expensive, as Saab has driven the price up championing the greener use of bio fuels.

MPACUK does not have the answer, but politics does, engagement does, carefully taking principled positions to make sure that wealth distribution is equitable and that the poor do not always suffer the most. We (Muslims) must be brave and intellectually curious in understanding the different solutions offered by different ideologies and accept those which are compatible with Islam and then make them work.

It is not in the nature of man to ignore the social fabric we live in, it is in our nature; call it human nature to change the environment, to make things better for those worse off.