The people are hungry: The link between food and revolution

[xchrom]

http://grist.org/food/the-people-are-hungry-the-link-between-food-and-revolution/

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The rising price of food isn’t the only thing driving the revolutionary fervor from Tunisia to Turkey to Brazil. The bad economy was surely a principal factor (remember that Adel Khazri shouted “This is Tunisia, this is unemployment,” as he burned). There was the effect of new social media technology. And then there was that tyranny thing that people seemed to dislike.

But food scarcity is different, because it looks as if it’s going to stick around even as the economy improves. And unless we do something about it, the riots and protests will spread.

As Motherboard writer Brian Merchant put it:

Two years ago, the New England Complex Systems Institute published a famous paper that sussed out the mathematical correlation between food prices and unrest: Every time food prices breached a certain threshold, riots broke out worldwide.

We’ve been bouncing around that threshold — 210 on the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization index — for years now.


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[marmar]

1. k/r

[daleanime]

2. bookmarked

nt

[mick063]

3. This is just the beginning

It is going to get much, much worse.

Perhaps a coincidental convergence, perhaps not, but domestic militarism is not a good mix with this trend.

It smells like repression to me.

[Brigid]

4. It is often said . . .

That any country is about 9-10 meals from revolution.

[Igel]

5. Yep.

With the warning that revolution seldom increases the amount of food available. It almost always decreases the food supply.

So accomplishes a redistribution of the death toll among different groups of society, with a small mortality surcharge.

And pity the food producer who doesn't yield his family's food. Those who feed others in good times are often the second to suffer in revolution, when anybody that stands in your way is an enemy and the revolutionary masses realize that the problem wasn't the relatively small number of rich hording kilotonnes of food but simply a shortage of food.