Across the country, ethanol plants are swallowing more and more of the nation's corn crop. This year, about a quarter of U.S. corn will go to feeding ethanol plants instead of poultry or livestock. That has helped farmers like Johnson, but it has boosted demand -- and prices -- for corn at the same time global grain demand is growing.

And it has linked food and fuel prices just as oil is rising to new records, pulling up the price of anything that can be poured into a gasoline tank. "The price of grain is now directly tied to the price of oil," says Lester Brown, president of Earth Policy Institute, a Washington research group. "We used to have a grain economy and a fuel economy. But now they're beginning to fuse."

The words are from the fourth and penultimate article in the Washington Post series on the Global Food Crisis.  This is entitled Siphoning Off Corn to Fuel Our Cars and is subtitled "As farmers feed ethanol plants, a costly link is forged between food and oil."   That cost may be more than the world - and humanity - can bear.

A brutal convergence of events has hit an unprepared global market, and grain prices are sky high.  The world's poor suffer most.

  That is the subtitle of a piece called The New Economics of Hunger which takes 3 of the four columns of my Sunday Washington Post's front page, above the fold and slightly below.  When one jumps to the continuation on page A22 the subtitle reads "The Anatomy of a Massive Price Shock."   At the very top of the page, above the title, one sees a black box with the words all in caps: GLOBAL FOOD CRISIS  If one examines the online version, one sees the same Accompanying this lead story is another piece on the front of the Outlook section entitled A Full Plate Today, Uncertainty Tomorrow  Clearly the issue of hunger is now of concern in our national capital, as the Post has validated the issue