The world’s first major food crisis since World War ii is spreading from the Third World to the First World.

The food crisis poses as big a threat to world prosperity as the global credit crunch, warns Gordon Brown. The British prime minister issued this warning Tuesday during a meeting in London with Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World Food Program.

Sheeran said, “What we are seeing now is affecting more people on every continent, destroying even more livelihoods, and the nutrition losses will hurt children for a lifetime.”

As the Observernoted on May 11:

For the past half-century, Britain has been lulled into the belief that a plentiful supply of food is here to stay. Supermarkets give us a season-defying availability of agricultural products, sourced from all over the planet, 365 days a year. We gorge ourselves on Peruvian asparagus, Israeli potatoes, Chilean apples and New Zealand lamb, blissfully unaware this might not go on forever.

The truth is that Britain (and America for that matter) produces far less food than it consumes because it is cheaper to import food from cheap-labor countries like Thailand or Brazil. In 1994, Britain produced 75 percent of its food domestically, and now produces only 60 percent of what it eats. As food exporter nations stop exporting, Britain’s source of food is diminishing.

In just one year, food prices across Britain have skyrocketed: Durum wheat has increased over 250 percent, milk has gone up 20 percent, butter by 60 percent, eggs 43 percent and beef mince has increased 17 percent. And these rising prices are only making the British more reliant on foreign imports as British farmers find it even harder to compete with their low-paid foreign counterparts.

For more information on the implications of coming food shortages, read “Are You Watching the Food Riots?”