Food
Motherboard - Conflict continues to sweep Egypt, and the death toll is rising fast. Demonstrators protesting ex-president Mohammed Morsi's ouster are the latest victims, and they number at least in the hundreds. The region has been wracked with conflict for months now, and, while the West is fond of blaming Morsi's incompetence as a governor, the problem may be much more fundamental than that-Egypt is starving.
When people are hungry, societies tend to unravel, regardless of whether it's led by an authoritarian tyrant or a democratic body. When food is too expensive, people can't eat. And all over the world, food is way too expensive right now.
Two years ago, the New England Complex Systems Institute published a paper that sussed out the mathematical correlation between food prices and unrest: Every time food prices breached a certain threshold, riots broke out worldwide.
That all-important threshold is about 210 on the FAO Food Price Index. That's the "measure of the monthly change in international prices of a basket of food commodities," according to the United Nations.
In 2008, the wake of the global economic crash, food prices skyrocketed to 220. Violent protests and riots swept the globe. In 2011, food prices spiked, and breached the threshold again-and the Arab Spring was born. Today, most of us remember of the millions-strong demonstrations and the toppled dictators, but recall that the uprising began when one man was so desperate and humiliated that he couldn't feed his family that he set himself on fire.
In May 2013, right before millions of angry Egyptians took to Tahrir Square, the index was at 213. For most of the spring, it had hovered well above 210, meaning that food was prohibitively expensive for Egypt's poor for a full three months before people took to the streets in dissent.
And sure enough, food access is a crippling problem in Egypt even today. UPI reports that "Bassem Ouda, the minister of supplies in the government of President Mohamed Morsi-who was ousted by the army July 3-admitted last week the state has less than two months' supply of imported wheat in stock, or about 500,000 metric tons."
Egypt isn't alone. I recently spoke to Yaneer Bar-Yam, the chief author of the NECSI paper, and he told me that much of the unrest of the past year-in Turkey, Brazil, and Syria as the highest-profile examples-can be tied to rising food prices.
Climate change
BBC - Shifts in climate are strongly linked to increases in violence around the world, a study suggests.
US scientists found that even small changes in temperature or rainfall correlated with a rise in assaults, rapes and murders, as well as group conflicts and war.
The team says with the current projected levels of climate change, the world is likely to become a more violent place.
The study is published in Science.
Marshall Burke, from the University of California, Berkeley, said: "This is a relationship we observe across time and across all major continents around the world. The relationship we find between these climate variables and conflict outcomes are often very large."
The researchers looked at 60 studies from around the world, with data spanning hundreds of years.
They report a "substantial" correlation between climate and conflict.
Their examples include an increase in domestic violence in India during recent droughts, and a spike in assaults, rapes and murders during heatwaves in the US.
The report also suggests rising temperatures correlated with larger conflicts, including ethnic clashes in Europe and civil wars in Africa.
Biological root?
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