General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe people are hungry: The link between food and revolution
http://grist.org/food/the-people-are-hungry-the-link-between-food-and-revolution/?w=470&h=313
The rising price of food isnt 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 its 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.
Weve been bouncing around that threshold 210 on the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization index for years now.
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daleanime
(17,796 posts)nt
mick063
(2,424 posts)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
(17,621 posts)That any country is about 9-10 meals from revolution.
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.