It may not be those pesky Tibetans and their worldwide sympathizers who will upset China's hope for glory in the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Instead, it may be the pesky, pricey porker, and the rest of the food inflation.

Food riots were common in China during 2007, when the price of pork and rice went through the celestial ceiling. At one point last year, the inflation rate on pork was over 50 percent. This causes two kinds of upset, one psychological and one economic.

First, the Chinese love pork. To have it become unaffordable creates a terrible angst. Worse yet, the pork inflation started during "The Year of the Golden Pig," which was supposed to be the most auspicious year of the last sixty for starting businesses, getting married and having children – and getting a little fatter.

But while Shanghai was trumpeting an obesity epidemic, there were over 500 million Chinese living at or below the poverty line (which is much harsher than the poverty line in the USA). When the price of pork and rice shoot up, people go hungry, and many starve. The Chinese who live in rural areas are small, wiry and very thin. There isn't an ounce of spare fat to sustain them when food prices inflate beyond their reach.

In fact, the Tibetan uprisings and protests were probably made more severe by the hungry bellies of central and western China. All over the world, growling stomachs tend to produce quick tempers. With food inflation raging everywhere, food riots had broken out in over 35 countries by April 2008.

And things are projected to get worse as speculators drive up the "Thai rice export price" and all other food commodities. Now the problems increase as individual households began to hoard food, fearing future scarcity.

What can China and all the developing nations of the world do to alleviate the problem and prevent mass uprisings?

In the short run, the government has got to feed its people. Long-term solutions do not prevent short-term starvation. This means that President Hu has to stop yammering about self-sufficiency and start importing food, regardless of price.

He has an enormous army, auxiliary forces and police who could start handing out rice bags instead of beatings. And he has the infrastructure of highways, roads and railways capable of a mass food distribution. (During the September 2007 Shanghai Typhoon, President Hu was able to evacuate 2.4 million people during the floods.)

In the long term, there are five critical steps President Hu should take.

1. Protect his remaining farmland. Urban sprawl, land speculation and desertification are rapidly shrinking China's arable farm land. November is a bad month to visit northern China because the sand and soil storms blowing in from central and western China make life on the street in Beijing untenable.

The Communist Party has the power to stop land speculation and much urban sprawl. By planting the kind of tree breaks found in America, China could prevent its farmland from blowing away. There is so little arable land left in the center and west that China's southern farmers must double- and triple-crop in order to produce adequate fruits, vegetables and rice. Although China is a large country, it has only seven percent of the world's arable land, trying to support 20 percent of the world's people.

2. Consolidate individual farm plots into efficient agricultural operations. The potential for sustaining the local population from farms of one or two acres is sharply limited. Big food supplies can only be produced by big mechanized farms. In the early 19th century, an American farm family could barely subsist with "forty acres and a mule." How can anyone expect a Chinese farm family to subsist on two-acre plots? Peasants and their plots cannot feed China. But John Deere and big farms can.

3. Conserve water so as to provide more irrigated farming. China has wasted its water resources via overuse and pollution. The water tables in northern China have dropped precipitously. To provide adequate water for the Olympics, the government has talked about draining off waters from the Yangtze to resupply the depleted Yellow River system. (Instead, President Hu has decided to drain the water from four adjoining provinces to make Beijing's water supply look plentiful for the Olympics.)

4. Dramatically increase grain yields by using agricultural chemicals more efficiently and effectively. For example, China uses more fertilizer than any other country, but it has failed for decades to apply enough potash. As a result, China produces only about 80 bushels of corn per acre. (The USA produces 157 bushels per acre, and the number is rising.)

5. Curtail China's rapidly rising taste for pork and beef. In the past 20 years, China's consumption of meat has almost quadrupled. Because raising cattle and hogs is extremely grain intensive, China's grain output may not be able to keep up. Because it takes twice as much grain to feed animals as it does people, the government may have to apply economic pressures to its cities' rapidly growing appetite for meat. Eastern Chinese cities worry about obesity, while its people in the midwest and west go hungry.

These five steps are needed to keep the restive rurals from rising up and overthrowing the regime. While that may sound extreme, that has been the history of China. There have been more 4,000 years of dynasties built and destroyed. For more than 800 years, there was no China, just 10 kingdoms.

While Americans look at Mao as a Communist Revolutionary, China's rulers see him as something else – a rural revolutionist whose long march destroyed the democracy of Dr. Sun Yat Sen.

It could happen again.

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