Commodity Traders Helped Spark the War in Syria, Complex Systems Theorists Say
Complex systems theorists say that a combination of deregulated markets, commodity speculation, and food-to-fuel ethanol policies are the direct cause of the spike in food prices that led to the Arab Spring and the civil war in Syria.
A new paper, published in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, concludes that the “two sharp peaks in 2007/2008 and 2010/2011 are specifically due to investor speculation, whereas an underlying upward trend is due to increasing demand from ethanol conversion.” In the new research, NECSI says it has, for the first time, “quantitatively determined that speculation caused these sharp rises in price."
In 2012, researchers affiliated with MIT demonstrated that there was a correlation between rising global food prices and the outbreak of civil unrest worldwide: Whenever prices eclipsed 210 on the UN’s FAO Food Index, a measure of the monthly change in international prices of core food commodities, riots and conflict became much more likely.
That model, put forward by Yaneer Bar-Yam and the New England Complex Systems Institute, correctly predicted the Arab Spring and the spate of uprisings—some of which would eventually become civil wars—that followed. One revolution began in Syria, which has been locked in a state of brutal, unrelenting war ever since.
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