Skip to main content

Global social unrest because of soaring prices of food?

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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Robert Fisk's predictions for the Middle East in 2013

There is no gain-saying that Robert Fisk, fiercely independent and feisty to boot, is the veteran journalist and author covering the Middle East. Who doesn't he know or hasn't he met over the years in reporting from Beirut - where he lives?  In his latest op-ed piece for The Independent he lays out his predictions for the Middle East for 2013. Read the piece in full, here - well worthwhile - but an extract... "Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...” So let’s say this for 2013: the “Arab Awakening” (the t...

#1 Prize for a bizarre story.....and lying!

No comment called for in this piece from CommonDreams: Another young black man: The strange sad case of 21-year-old Chavis Carter. Police in Jonesboro, Arkansas  stopped  him and two friends, found some marijuana, searched put Carter, then put him handcuffed  behind his back  into their patrol car, where they say he  shot himself  in the head with a gun they failed to find. The FBI is investigating. Police Chief Michael Yates, who stands behind his officers' story,  says in an interview  that the death is "definitely bizarre and defies logic at first glance." You think?

Intelligence agencies just can't help themselves

It is insidious and becoming increasingly widespread. Intelligence agencies in countries around the world, in effect, snooping on private exchanges between people not accussed of anything - other than simply using the internet or their mobile phone. The Age newspaper, in Australia, reports on how that country's intelligence operatives now want to widen their powers. It's all a slippery and dangerous slope! The telephone and internet data of every Australian would be retained for up to two years and intelligence agencies would be given increased access to social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter under new proposals from Australia's intelligence community. Revealed in a discussion paper released by the Attorney-General's Department, the more than 40 proposals form a massive ambit claim from the intelligence agencies. If passed, they would be the most significant expansion of the Australian intelligence community's powers since the Howard-era reform...