A Haitian woman preparing mud cakes.

War on Want director John Hilary wrote a pretty good piece for Comment Isn't Free yesterday on the state of media coverage of poverty and the poor world - it's a pretty dire state, and largely failing to provide any attention whatsoever to the countries in which the majority of the world's population lives, let alone critical attention that subjects our own role to rigorous scrutiny. Hilary even slips in what must surely be a rare bit of criticism of the Guardian, though he surely gives Comment Is Free a good deal too much credit. But that's another subject for another time.

The starting point for Hilary's piece is Blog Action Day, an occasional for the blogging community to sound off on an important topic. This year's is poverty, and so here is my small, belated contribution. Or rather, here's my commentary on one of our government's own major contributions to global poverty. As was revealed in a leaked World Bank report last July, the introduction of biofuels as a source of "sustainable" fuel has accounted for 75% of the 140% price rise since 2002. The basic reason for this is not difficult to grasp: by diverting substantial areas of land from growing crops for food to providing fuel for vehicles, biofuels have caused a shortfall in the amount of food available on international markets.

The effects have been pretty predictable, but remain deeply shocking nonetheless. Oxfam previously produced a report estimating - profoundly conservatively, as it turned out - that biofuels were responsible for 30% of the rise in global food prices, pushing a cool 30 million people into poverty. As the World Bank's leaked report makes clear, the real figure is in fact 2-and-a-half times greater than this: in fact, biofuels account for 75% of the world food crisis, translating (via an admittedly unimpressive arithmetical leap) into forcing 75 million people into poverty. This is supported by the Bank's own figures, which suggest 100 million have been pushed below the poverty line by the food crisis as a whole. The human consequences are at least as edifying. Food riots have broken out across the world. Dirt-poor Haitians (left utterly unprotected from the fluctuations of the global market by the IMF's cracking open of its economy to foreign imports - part of a neoliberal policy regime of which our government has long been a major champion) have been forced into eating mud cakes, to stave off the hunger pangs they refer to as "drinking bleach". Drinking bleach, and eating mud. This is the state to which our policy has reduced some of the world's poorest people. No wonder, perhaps, that Jean Ziegler, the UN's special rapporteur on the right to food, has called biofuels a "crime against humanity".

The policy has been allowed to proceed largely in the dark, outside the reach of public scrutiny. In an echo of the facts to which John Hilary alludes on the media's not only uncritical but largely absent coverage of poverty, a poll by Friends of the Earth in April found that almost nine in ten people in Britain had no idea that biofuels were being introduced into their petrol that month. Of those that are aware, how many have any understanding of this policy's direct link to the mass starvation of millions? Given that two-thirds of respondents to the poll had no awareness of another great catastrophe precipitated by biofuels, through their link to deforestation (and thus to exacerbating climate change), while just over half even knew what biofuels were, it is unlikely to be very many.

So what has been the reaction to this humanitarian catastrophe? On the part of the European Parliament, the approach seems to be "if you're in a hole, dig fractionally more slowly". In the face of opposition to the policy a compromise has been hammered out, the Guardian reported last month, which retains the EU's target for 10% biofuel-sourced fuel for transport by 2020, but includes some "second generation" biofuels (made from wood, straw and waste). An utterly unthinkable crime against humanity, in other words, has been rejected in favour of an appalling crime against humanity. Great news, I think you'll agree.

So much of our mainstream political culture portrays poverty as almost a fact of life, an independent and free-floating phenomenon for which we have as little to blame as we have the capacity to alter it. When we do intervene in the lives of the poor outside our borders, it is out of our own (perhaps misguided) benevolence. When the suggestion that ruthless systems of power might be involved is invoked in explanation, it is not our power, but that of our corrupt and despotic enemies. Yet the facts of the global food crisis, and of its foundations in biofuels, have given the lie to this portrayal. As oil prices have risen, biofuels have provided a great way to keep cars on the road, while severely exacerbating global poverty. Yet it is not the public who are driving this policy - ignorant as they are of its very facts of its existence, let alone its dire consequences. It is being driven by the usual beneficiaries of our current economic system, who are doing just fine out of it, thank you very much. If millions of "disposable people" are to be driven into starvation as a result, that's just the cost of doing business.