Josette Sheeran of the World Food Programme, a United Nations agency has called the wave of food-price inflation moving through the world, leaving riots and shaken governments in its wake, a 'silent tsunami'. For the first time in 30 years, food protests are erupting in many places at once.

Bangladesh is in turmoil, China is worried and in India, governments have been known to rise and fall with the price of onions. Elsewhere, the food crisis of 2008 will test the assertion of Amartya Sen that famines do not happen in democracies. They should indeed have no possibility of occurrence in democracies.

Do we, the humans, have any real understanding of the true import of a word like 'democracy'? Even a casual look around into spaces as immediate as the home or work place (forget the political implications of this simple yet ponderous word), will reveal that none of us can truly vouch for our surrounding environment as operationally democratic.

In general, we have a very poor appreciation of all that the term implies and specially in reference to the services "provided" by Mother Nature, including those supplied to us by its components as non-aggressive and ubiquitous as plants, worms, or any of the other insects inhabiting the same planet. Let us look at the free pollination of crops and orchards by honeybees and other insects, which unacknowledged by us till very recently, have a major contribution to make to our food supplies. Roughly a billion people live on less than Rs 40 or a dollar a day and if, the cost of the food rises 20%, 100 million more people could recede to this level, which is the measure of absolute poverty. In some countries, like India that would undo all the gains in poverty reduction during the past decade of growth. The food crisis of 2008 may indeed accelerate into the biggest challenge yet to globalisation. Let us pick one insect-the honeybee. Honeybees pollinate 130 different crops, which supply $15 billion worth of food and ingredients each year. It is estimated that one out of every three bites of food on our plates is made possible by honeybee pollination.

The food industry, specially in the West, is now waking up to the fact. According to one report the brand manager of international ice-cream giant Haagen-Dazs has announced a new programme to fund and encourage research into the problem, with the hopes of staving off a crisis for its own business: "Haagen-Dazs ice cream is made from the finest all-natural ingredients, and the plight of the honeybee could mean many of the ingredients used in our top flavours, like Vanilla Swiss Almond and Strawberry, would be difficult to source." Nearly 40 percent of Haagen-Dazs' ice cream flavours include bee-dependent ingredients. The bee problem could badly hurt supply."

In the present era of food scarcity, the honeybees problem goes way beyond ice cream to one-third of the human food supply. If honeybees stop doing all the free work they've been doing to pollinate crops, humans are going to find themselves in a very difficult situation regarding global food supplies. A global famine could emerge as an immediate threat, especially when we combine the loss of honeybee populations with rapidly deteriorating soil quality across the world's farmlands, due to disappearing populations of the worms and insects contributing to soil renewal. Our increasing conversion to consumerist cultures has pushed earth's ecosystems over the edge. We've polluted the skies, the land and the waters with our urban lifestyles. We have used up all the minerals, and destroyed the rainforests, depleted soils and devastated its wild animal population. We've dumped chemicals, radioactive waste and mountains of trash into the oceans and waterway and yet we cannot understand why our food crops are affected and why are honeybees disappearing?

Its time to take a look at our consumption and production practices, and for each one of us to take a personal pledge to treat the environment day as the 'accepted time to begin to work towards our 'salvation', as the holy text urges. Let us hope that we never see the human population collapse in the way the honeybee populations are collapsing, but as the saying goes: as go the insects, so go humans.