The FT’s Gideon Rachman has a terrific column today mulling over the question that this week’s UN food summit in Rome is likely to sweep politely beneath the carpet: the question of fair shares to scarce global commodities like energy, food and ‘airspace’ for our emissions.

It is all very awkward. China and India are getting richer. And it appears their new middle classes want all the things we want: cars, washing machines, even meat. Here in the west, we have to restrain ourselves from saying: “Stop. You can’t live like us. The planet can’t stand it. And our wallets can’t stand it. Have you seen the price of petrol?”

Global equity is the awkward issue lying behind the world food crisis. In the long run, it will also prove fundamental to discussions on energy and global warming.

Gideon’s clearly right that asking China, India and other emerging economies to stay poor is a total non-starter (politically as well as morally) - but on the other hand (as his article also makes clear), the problem is that a burgeoning global middle class also risks leaving the world’s poor in an untenable position, now that supplies of energy, food, water, land and ‘airspace’ for our emissions are all getting scarce. Moises Naim asked in a recent LA Times editorial whether the world could afford a middle class - he might have asked whether the poor can afford one, too.

On climate change, at least, we’ve known for a while where the debate needs to go. Given that stabilising the climate will necessarily entail sharing out a safe global ‘emissions budget’, we can’t duck the question of how to share such a budget out - and, by extension, how to satisfy the different equity claims of both emerging economies and least developed countries. How to do that? In a nutshell, through enshrining the principle of fair shares to the global common resource of the atmosphere through a process of convergence to equal per capita emission rights by some agreed date (2030, 2050, the day after tomorrow - whatever countries can hammer out). More and more people in the climate debate are now accepting that proposition (Nick Stern being a notable recent convert), and discussion of it ought to figure heavily on the road to next year’s Copenhagen summit.

With food, though, it’s very much harder to see how the principle of fair shares can be operationalised. At this week’s UN food summmit, the demand side effects of changing diet patterns aren’t even being talked about seriously, even though most analysts agree they’re the most important driver of rising food prices.

Still, one starting point would be to get some basic analytical tools up on the web. If I want to calculate my lifestyle’s carbon footprint, there are any number of websites that will allow me to do just that - and to see whether I’m living within or beyond my ‘fair share’ of the atmosphere.  But if I look for a calculator to figure out my diet’s “grain footprint” - the amount of wheat, corn and other cereals needed not just for my daily bread, but (more significantly) the meat, dairy products and processed food in my western diet - I draw a blank. As a result, I’ve no way of telling whether I’m taking food out of someone else’s food bowl, or being a responsible consumer and living within my fair share.

True, grain footprint calculators hardly represent a comprehensive global solution.  But if global food supply fails to keep pace with demand growth - forecast by the World Bank to rise by 50% by 2030 - then they’re not a bad place to start the discussion.

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