From Bloomberg via Malaysia's The Edge Markets, September 15:
Whether for bread, rice or tortillas, governments across the world know that rising food costs can come with a political price. The dilemma is whether they can do enough to prevent having to pay it.
Global food prices were up 33% in August from a year earlier with vegetable oil, grains and meat on the rise, data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization show. And it’s not likely to get better as extreme weather, soaring freight and fertilizer costs, shipping bottlenecks and labour shortages compound the problem. Dwindling foreign currency reserves are also hampering the ability of some nations to import food.
From Europe to Turkey and India, politicians are now handing out more aid, ordering sellers to cut prices and tinkering with trade rules to mitigate the impact on consumers.
Food inflation spurred more than two dozen riots across Asia, the Middle East and Africa, contributing to the Arab Spring uprisings 10 years ago. Pockets of discontentment are growing again. Unrest in South Africa triggered by the arrest of former President Jacob Zuma in July turned to food as people looted grocery stores and restaurants. Shortages in Cuba led to the biggest protests in decades.
Adjusted for inflation and annualized, costs are already higher now than for almost anytime in the past six decades, according FAO data. Indeed, it’s now harder to afford food than it was during the 2011 protests in the Middle East that led to the overthrow of leaders in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, said Alastair Smith, senior teaching fellow in global sustainable development at Warwick University in the UK.
“Food is more expensive today than it has been for the vast majority of modern recorded history,” he said....
....MUCH MORE
One part of the Arab Spring narrative that we paid particular attention to was Syria. Here's a footnote from one post:
note: Example #10 on Syria's 2005 - 2008 drought links to a paper that lays the blame for Syria's civil war on human-caused climate change.
This may be in error as 1) attribution studies are tricky beasties. 2) the assumed proximal source of conflict, crop failure, was found by later research to not have occurred with anywhere near the assumed extent.
3) A factor in bringing on the civil war, at least as large as the weather, was the fact the West, led by the United States as part of the Arab Spring, decided to arm counter-Assad ISIS and other Jihadi forces to overthrow the Assad government.
And the introduction to another:
"The WEF Global Risks Interconnections Map"
I was debating whether to post this because the author uses a weather/climate attribution for the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings that is not really true. I'm sure the folks at New England Complex Systems Institute meant well but, as just one example, Syria, the poster child of the of the climate > conflict story favored by the explainers and attributors of that time was brought to civil war, not by the drought that was going on but by Western governments exporting weapons from Libya to Syria (the ratlines) after the murder of Gaddafi. The amount of wheat on the Syrian market did not fall as much as some have portrayed, and with government-backed imports there was nothing that odd going on. It was after the war was started that wheat production was cut in half, and by 2015 the academics were calling out the specious claims:
https://blogs.kcl.ac.uk/geography/2015/12/09/why-prince-charles-is-wrong-on-syria-and-climate-change/We were keeping a pretty close eye on things and did not see what the fabulists were pitching.
All that being said the graph is interesting....
