Guardian UK: Food price rises threaten global security - UN

[marmar]

Food price rises threaten global security - UN
Hunger riots will destabilise weak governments, says senior official

David Adam, environment correspondent
The Guardian, Wednesday April 9 2008


Rising food prices could spark worldwide unrest and threaten political stability, the UN's top humanitarian official warned yesterday after two days of rioting in Egypt over the doubling of prices of basic foods in a year and protests in other parts of the world.

Sir John Holmes, undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs and the UN's emergency relief coordinator, told a conference in Dubai that escalating prices would trigger protests and riots in vulnerable nations. He said food scarcity and soaring fuel prices would compound the damaging effects of global warming. Prices have risen 40% on average globally since last summer.

"The security implications should also not be underestimated as food riots are already being reported across the globe," Holmes said. "Current food price trends are likely to increase sharply both the incidence and depth of food insecurity."

He added that the biggest challenge to humanitarian work is climate change, which has doubled the number of disasters from an average of 200 a year to 400 a year in the past two decades.

As well as this week's violence in Egypt, the rising cost and scarcity of food has been blamed for:

· Riots in Haiti last week that killed four people

· Violent protests in Ivory Coast

· Price riots in Cameroon in February that left 40 people dead

· Heated demonstrations in Mauritania, Mozambique and Senegal

· Protests in Uzbekistan, Yemen, Bolivia and Indonesia

UN staff in Jordan also went on strike for a day this week to demand a pay rise in the face of a 50% hike in prices, while Asian countries such as Cambodia, China, Vietnam, India and Pakistan have curbed rice exports to ensure supplies for their own residents. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/09/food.unitednations

[SteinbachMB]

1. It "could" spark...

..unrest and threaten political stability? Well, will it or not?

[marmar]

3. Look at the headlines from Africa and India....It already is.

n/t

[SteinbachMB]

4. They tend to have

...a fair amount of unrest there anyway.

[marmar]

5. Umm, this is pretty specific to food prices. But feel free to spout uninformed BS......

:eyes:

[SteinbachMB]

6. Thanks

sparky.

[gear_head]

2. becoming dependent on cheap US exports was a mistake

avoid in the future

[GliderGuider]

7. That's tough to avoid in a globalized marketplace

"Becoming dependent on cheap Chinese exports was a mistake"
"Becoming dependent on cheap Chilean exports was a mistake"
"Becoming dependent on cheap Canadian exports was a mistake"

In everything from bath toys to softwood lumber, how does the consumer resist low prices?

[The2ndWheel]

8. Two ways to go

1) Continue the dominant momentum of the last few thousand years, integrating more and more ways of life into the same global security infrastructure, and increasing the impact we have on the planet as has been happening every year of this current trajectory.

2) Somehow stop that momentum(likely not something anyone has any real control over anymore), break the world down to a human scale, and let the chips fall where they may. Our impacts environmentally will still exist, they just won't be as big.

There isn't a happy ending. There will be no utopia either way. No matter what we do, we're going to have to give up something, or take something, to get it done. We can build a technological paradise, but it will not come without cost. We can live in caves and huts, it will not come without cost. We don't get to have the positive side of what we do, without also having the negative. We don't get to escape. Every action has that equal and opposite reaction. There is no perfect state to existence. There is no steady state to existence. We live in physical reality, and we can't get out.

[tama]

9. empirical collapse of empire

You seem to "get it" quite well. :)

I would like to ad that the dominant momentum of empire building aka "civilization" aka "globalization": colonialism, subjugation, intergration and assimilation (while ethnociding local peoples, languages and cultures that resist and refuse the dominant momentum of universalism) cannot continue but is now coming to a turning point, as predicted by Club of Rome report on limits of growth. The dominant momentum of growthism is dependent on more and more usable energy to build more and more socially negentropic interconnected complexities; when the limit of growth is reached with limit of primary energy source (oil), entropy hits back with vengeance and way back to human size simplicities is relatively short (and painfull). But as the laws of thermodynamics state: there is no way out.