Staff of life, bread of death

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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/MG23Dj02.html

What can a humble loaf of bread tell us about the world?

The answer is: far more than you might imagine. For one thing, that loaf can be ''read'' as if it were a core sample extracted from the heart of a grim global economy. Looked at another way, it reveals some of the crucial fault lines of world politics, including the origins of the Arab spring that has now become a summer of discontent.

Consider this: between June 2010 and June 2011, world grain prices almost doubled. In many places on this planet, that proved an unmitigated catastrophe. In those same months, several governments fell, rioting broke out in cities from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, to Nairobi, Kenya, and most disturbingly three new wars began in Libya, Yemen, and Syria. Even on Egypt's Sinai


Peninsula, Bedouin tribes are now in revolt against the country's interim government and manning their own armed roadblocks.

And in each of these situations, the initial trouble was traceable, at least in part, to the price of that loaf of bread. If these upheavals were not ''resource conflicts'' in the formal sense of the term, think of them at least as bread-triggered upheavals.

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1. Speculators are the new locusts....

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2. One of the main causes of the French Revolution

were speculators driving up the price of Flour and the Rich hoarding Flour, waiting for the price to rise.

This is where the infamous statement by Marie Antoinette "Let them eat Cake." came from, when she was told the People have no Bread.