Blame your biofuel fixation, not India and China, Bush is told LOGIC and empirical facts do not necessarily form a part of United States President George W. Bush's assertions. Five years ago, he went to war against Iraq to unearth weapons of mass destruction that weren't there. And now, in 2008, he blames India's burgeoning middle classes for the northward gallop of food prices in his country, claiming that their growing demand for food has constrained supplies and jacked up costs in the US. Food experts couldn't disagree more with Bush; they would rather that he look for reasons closer home. He might well find the real culprit for high food prices in the West's obsession with the production of biofuels as a way of weaning itself away from West Asian oil. Leading the charge is Nicholas Minot, a senior research fellow at the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (ifpri). "The fact that India and China have a growing middle class and that there is a demand for food is a good thing," he points out. "This is a success story. Rather than blaming India and China for purchasing more food than they used to, we need to focus on what can be done to meet their increasing demands." Besides, Minot and others argue, the rise of the middle class worldwide and changing consumption patterns in China, India, and even Africa, have been the trend for the past 5-10 years. It is consequently wrong, they say, to hold these decade-long trends responsible for food prices rising only over the last six months. "That's part of the explanation, but it can't be the whole explanation," Minot told Outlook. Likewise, food experts take exception to Bush's singling out India and China for the crisis. "No one country