One of our clients, just back from Haiti, reported people rioting for food and eating dirt to fill their stomachs. The ever-worsening world food crisis is a terrible humanitarian tragedy, but it is finally one issue that cannot be blamed on global corporations – or is it? Where are the boundaries of corporate social responsibility today?

We all understand that companies need to take responsibility for the social or environmental harms they may cause. We’ve also learned that companies can be held accountable for the labor practices of their suppliers and even for the predictably imprudent behavior of their customers. Any linkage to the world food crisis seems much more attenuated.

Yet there is a linkage. We hear that hedge funds playing the commodity markets are contributing to the run up in prices. The new emphasis on biofuels, subsidized heavily by government incentives, has creating a competing market for crops. Climate change, attributable in large part to power plants and transportation, has led to droughts and floods that reduce crop yields. Even more broadly, the continued consumption of fossil fuels and the accompanying rise in the price of oil has put pressure on petroleum-based fertilizers. It may not be possible to single out any one company as a culprit, but the connection between corporate behavior and the food crisis is genuine: must companies respond by changing their practices?

Even more troubling is the question of any affirmative obligation to help solve the problem. After all, the developed markets where most goods are sold are the least affected, so any impact on company sales is insignificant. Americans, for example, may grumble about higher prices at the grocery store, but food represents a much smaller share of their total spending, and raw ingredients represent a much smaller part of the ultimate purchase price of our highly processed foods. In the developing world, there is no margin: higher prices mean that people eat less, or not at all.

Yet the fact that most companies are neither harmed by nor blamed for this crisis doesn’t mean that we should overlook what they could do to ameliorate it. Seed companies have the technologies to improve crop yields through genetic modification. Monsanto, for example, recently joined a public-private partnership with the Gates Foundation and the Africa Agricultural Technology Foundation to develop drought resistant corn. Transportation companies have the logistics to get food where it is most needed. TNT, for example, has long provided logistics support to the World Food Programme of the United Nations. Food companies and financial institutions have the financing that could enable small farmers to dramatically improve their productivity. Wal-Mart has joined with Mercy Corp and USAID to guarantee purchases of market-driven agricultural products from Guatemalan farmers, thereby greatly increasing the prices and predictability of crop sales. And the lobbying arm of most global corporations could do a great deal to alter agricultural tariffs and increase international aid.

Pharmaceutical companies offer a fascinating parallel. The leading global companies collectively distribute billions of dollars of free drugs to the developing world, prompted by a combination of public relations and humanitarian motivations. Like the food crisis, they didn’t cause the diseases nor do the populations they help represent lucrative potential markets. But they have stepped up to an affirmative obligation based on their unique capacity to help.

If every global corporation took action to address the world food crisis based on its own unique capabilities, that would be a welcome redefinition of corporate social responsibility, and more important, the problem would soon be solved.

Mark Kramer is Managing Director of FSG Social Impact Advisors. He is also the co-author, with Michael Porter, of the McKinsey Award-winning Harvard Business Review article, "Strategy and Society: The Link Between Competitive Advantage and Corporate Social Responsibility."