Let it not be said that climate change cannot have a geo-political effect amongst other things.... Mother Jones reports:
Twice in the last five years, rising food prices triggered global waves of social unrest. With drought baking US crops, another round of soaring, society-straining price spikes may happen in coming months.
According to researchers from the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), commodity speculation—investors betting on food prices—will amplify the drought's market signals, creating a new food bubble and the crises that follow.
"The drought is clearly going to kick prices up. It already has. What happens when you have speculators is that it goes through the roof," said NECSI president Yaneer Bar-Yam. "We've created an unstable system. Globally, we are very vulnerable."
The ongoing drought, the United States' worst since the Dust Bowl, is expected to last until October and will decimate US harvests. America is the world's largest exporter of corn, wheat, and soybeans; global prices for those commodities have already surged to record levels.
While the United States is relatively insulated from food price increases, people in developing countries, who spend far more of their budgets on food and rely on agricultural imports, are extremely vulnerable. For them, high prices are a catastrophe.
Since 2004, global food prices have slowly but steadily increased, with drastic and socially destabilizing spikes in 2007 and again in 2010. Economists argued over the causes, with blame cast on poor regional harvests, supply shortages caused by converting food crops to biofuels, and—most controversially—speculation.
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