Photos: When Food Prices Go Up, What Happens? | Nat Geo Live

We are now 7.3 billion fellow human beings, on the only place we can live, and in the next twenty-five years, we're going to be 9 billion fellow human beings with no other place to go.

I went to Egypt. Right before the landscape of the Great Pyramids of Giza, people are fighting for food. Because they couldn't afford food anymore, due to the rising cost of wheat. They had to get government subsidized bread. And every day in thousands of these kiosks across Egypt, people are fighting just to be able to get food. Something as basic as bread.

I went to Iowa, to look at the bread basket of the world, the United States. This is the Kuntz family, a fourth generation farmer. And boy, the commodity prices are going through the roof. They're making the money, they're making a bonanza. And this family is so engrained, they become literally, almost reflected in their combine. Become the product that they grow, product that they reap. But when commodity prices start to go through the roof because of natural disasters, like in this case, the Mississippi River, flooding the farmlands of Iowa. Commodity prices go through the roof, affecting all of us across the planet.

We also are having another divergence of food, out of our stomachs and into the stomachs of pigs, and also into the stomachs of our cars. Raising again, the cost of food. And that has an enormous impact on the cost of how we feed ourselves. We may not notice it in this country, but if you live on two dollars a day, you'll see that it does.

We went to the Amazon. Brazil wants to become the next bread basket of the world. President Dilma has no issues about cutting down the Amazon. There's a brilliant statement in what she said. "Okay, if you want us to keep the trees to produce oxygen, pay us." Because they want to have an economic bounty, because that's what we did in North America. That area of all of the Midwest used to be forests and swamps. And we created it as the world's largest bread basket. And other nations want to do the same thing.

We went to India to look at the Green Revolution. India in the sixties was crippled and hardly able to feed itself, coming out into independence. And in this case, now they're in a bounty because science and technology came together, fertilizers and pesticides.

This case a farmer is thrilled. Look how many people are riding on the top of a bounteous harvest. You'd never see that in America, code police would come out and say, "Too many people on your tractor." I think it's beautiful actually. (audience laughter) But they, they polluted their water table system. And in the Punjab region of Northwest India, birth defects and cancer rates through the roof. All in order to try to feed ourselves.

In the Philippines, with the rising commodity prices, children want to become farmers again. Instead of going to the city in metro Manila or overseas to work in houses in Saudi Arabia and Hong Kong as housekeepers. Why? Because you can make a living to be a farmer again.

And here younger children are learning, from their grandparents, how to be farmers again. So, pretty neat. And in the Philippines, is the International Rice Research Institute where everyday rice comes in from all over the world, and hands deftly sort each grain of rice for the strongest grains.

And here's how it's so important. When Pol Pot decimated the agricultural industry of Cambodia, all of their rice fields got destroyed. And they couldn't grow rice properly anymore when they brought in rice from Thailand and elsewhere. And IRRI, International Rice Research Institute, had a small packet of seeds in their vault, and they brought those seeds back to Cambodia, and to this day, the Cambodians are growing their own indigenous rice again. All because of these hands, deftly sorting out the strongest genes of seed.