Posted on 02/24/2014 10:13:24 PM PST by JerseyanExile
Point of order. King Canute did not attempt to command the ocean tides out of arrogance. His display was to show that a King had no power against the glory and power of God.
I don’t think food prices are the cause, just the effect. That doesn’t mean watching food prices isn’t helpful, they are, it just means we need to look at the triggers of rising food prices.
Perhaps. They are going to need something. They are probably one bad dry season away from starvation and thirst.
You can lay this out on top of the world price of oil and it looks exactly the same. Food production depends on energy. More in some places and less in other places.
Droughts and floods also come into play. The 2010 spike on the graph was caused by the Russian drought and Putin stopping wheat exports.
Some nations have a lot of sustenance farming or labor intensive farming and they have chronic output problems that are made worse by having to import grains.
At the CIA world Factbook, under the economic section, a(all) nations labor supply is characterized and those nations in which a high proportion of the labor supply is in farming, will always have ag output problems. Mexico has been trying to privatize their huge system of ag collectives(Ejidos) since they signed NAFTA.
In the US, only a very small percentage work in ag but we have a lot of part time farmers with regular jobs.
Today there are 7 billion, 9 billion in 2050, and 11 billion in 2100.
Give me an order of those grasshoppers sauteed in garlic butter
“Never thought of this as a trigger.”
It might be the trigger, but a lot of other poor economic and political decisions loaded the gun. When government corruption and policies create the situation where the people can’t afford, or even find, food, then logically, the gun will go off.
I’m sure that there are other correlations that fit just as well.
Excellent correlation: Food to energy. Energy can be linked to primarily politics.
Just over a year ago, complex systems theorists at the New England Complex Systems Institute warned us that if food prices continued to climb, so too would the likelihood that there would be riots across the globe. Sure enough, we're seeing them now. The paper's author, Yaneer Bar-Yam, charted the rise in the FAO food price index—a measure the UN uses to map the cost of food over time—and found that whenever it rose above 210, riots broke out worldwide. It happened in 2008 after the economic collapse, and again in 2011, when a Tunisian street vendor who could no longer feed his family set himself on fire in protest.That's rich -- the 2008 economic collapse. IOW, it's Bush's fault? No wait -- it's gotta be corn ethanol! /s
The problem for us may become a shorter growing season; to wet/ waiting for thaw before planting and early rains/ freezing conditions at harvest. There are alternative varieties for a shorter growing season, but the yields are much lower.
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