In Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth, the militant members of the Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation (KEVIN) claim they have an “acronym problem”. Not compared to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front! MILF has an acronym problem. And its real.

But names are the least of this Philippine radical group’s concerns. What they don’t have is food. At least they didn’t until Wednesday, when they picked up their guns and took over the coastal village of Sangay. Three hundred armed jihadists forced more than a thousand (mostly Christian) villagers off their land after demanding food and confiscating recently-harvested rice.

Up until now, the save-the-planet crowd has weakened the West mostly by way of sapping morale. Without an enormous colonial empire to oppose, anti-Westerners have to make do with railing against the immensity of the West’s “carbon footprint.” We’re supposed to feel guilty about the cars we drive and question the lightbulbs we use. Then came “biofuels.” The EU and the U.S. signed on to commitments requiring that vast amounts of food crops go to the production of burnable fuel.

As Mark Steyn put it, “When you divert 28 percent of U.S. grain into fuel production, and when you artificially make its value as fuel higher than its value as food, why be surprised that you’ve suddenly got less to eat?” Actually, we tubby Westerners can still walk into any McDonald’s and stuff our faces. It’s the developing world that’s literally eating dirt to survive.

But now we’ve arrived at the next step. When things get that bad in places like Cité Soleil and Mindanao, the only people who get what they need to live are the ones with guns. And in Sangay, that’s MILF. So, the global food shortage, brought on in part by environmentalist radicals, has enabled the Darwinian advancement of armed jihadists in the developing world. There have recently been food riots from the Phillipines to Indonesia to Egypt. In this last case the Muslim Brotherhood has lent their name to the cause. It doesn’t take an expert on world religions to spot the overlap between countries with too little food and countries with too many Islamists. One of the worst “innovations” spawned by Western guilt has just gotten appreciably worse.