[Revi]

I saw what happened when the government of Guatemala raised the price of tortillas. People freaked out. They started flipping busses over and burning them. Bread and circus are the things that have to keep going. Those Magreb countries know that they have to keep the price of basic foodstuffs down or people flip. They are going to keep buying wheat until they are broke or their credit dries up and then they are toast, like Tunisia.

I think people are pretty much the same when it comes to food. They will steal it when they get hungry. That's why they need to institute martial law when something really bad happens. If not, anarchy ensues.

I agree that we are 4 meals away from big problems.

[Arthur75]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Revi', 'I') saw what happened when the government of Guatemala raised the price of tortillas. People freaked out. They started flipping busses over and burning them. Bread and circus are the things that have to keep going. Those Magreb countries know that they have to keep the price of basic foodstuffs down or people flip. They are going to keep buying wheat until they are broke or their credit dries up and then they are toast, like Tunisia.

[Revi]

I know how each country can be very different. Every country has it's own culture. They will all react very differently when things get bad. It will be a very difficult thing to manage. A lot of them will try to manufacture an external threat. Blame it on some other country. Then whatever happens in your country was their fault. You don't have any bread to eat because the evil ________________ took it all.
name of people

[sparky]

.
Some more food protest, this time in Jordan
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/ja ... ood-prices

Same set up ,a society with no population control and no resources
keeping its population quiet by ever more expensive food subsidies
Arab countries with no oil are particularly vulnerable
their culture promote unrestricted breeding and their food production is pathetic
The big one is Egypt
and yes a bad harvest in Australia affect food price in Algeria

By the way China just bought 11 billions dollars worth of soybeans ,
a massive amount
Monday , the prices are going to go up for everybody else .

[dolanbaker]

Another suicide, this time in Saudi Arabia.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12260465
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'M')an dies after setting himself on fire in Saudi Arabia Continue reading the main story
A man has died after setting himself on fire in Saudi Arabia's south-western region of Jizan, officials have said.

Reports in the Saudi media say the man, who was in his 60s, set himself on fire using a petroleum product in the town of Samitah, and died later in hospital.

There have been several acts of self-immolation in the Arab world, mimicking the suicide of a man in Tunisia which provoked the anti-government uprising.

[eXpat]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pretorian', '
')Have you been in a crowd like that? I was and it was a fascinating expierence. Mortality in my crowd was 0.07-0.1% that day. And it was a pretty big crowd.

[Rod_Cloutier]

From some standpoint getting rid of all these third world despots and dictators through popular and internal revolutions has got be regarded as a good thing! The absolute poor rising up against totalitarian elites has historically been a positive force for change, which led to the destruction of all the European monarchs and created the first rebirth of democracy since the times of ancient Greece.

I think everyone would also agree that these uprisings are happening not because the US military has gone in there to inspire freedom and democracy, and has successfully created a domino effect on the region. The US did not have to get involved, US soldiers didn't have to die on foreign soils. This has to be a plus in somebody's playbook. A redistribution of wealth from these criminal kleptocracies to the absolute poor will buy these regions some time.

I sometimes wonder though, can't they just eat something other than imported staples like wheat, corn and rice? They must have other crops things like nuts, root crops, figs, some sort of domestic agriculture or fishery? If the wealthy weren't shipping all the Cocoa beans off to western overseas markets couldn't they subsist on domestically made chocolate until the next crop came in? I personally work for a food distribution company and we literally sell thousands of different food items. The supermarket I shop at has stuff I have never even tasted, (to my present age of 40), like dragonfruit, yams, clams, crab and so forth. Can they not hunt rabbits?

[Pretorian]

they are gone now along with all other wildlife.

[Revi]

A lot of people live crammed into megacities. Have you read Mike Davis's Planet of Slums? These third world cities spill out of their bounds and are not places where you can forage for food. A lot of people live close to the edge of starvation and in the countryside there are lots of people who are living very meagre lives as well. They are already exploiting every available food stuff. Where I lived in Guatemala there wasn't much wildlife left. There were a lot of plants that people ate and ways to supplement their diet. It's true that export crops took up a lot of the land, but that's hard to change.

[Pretorian]

And once people ( empoverished farmers or their countless brood ) make it into slums, its the government who is responsible for their diet and welfare. That was the case since Sumerian times. Not a subject to change,

[eXpat]

Oh, oh...
Wheat Futures At 29 Month High As Developing Country Demand Surges In Aftermath Of Tunisia Revolution
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'D')ow Jones reports that wheat futures just hit a 29-month highs on "strong global demand." Per the newswire, Algeria bought 800,000 tons of milling wheat, with traders estimating the nation's purchases for January at about 1.8M. Turkey and Jordan bought wheat last week after rising food prices helped fuel unrest in Tunisia. "They're saying, 'Boy we've got to eat. We don't know where wheat is going to be in a month,' says PFG Best. CBOT March wheat ends up 18 1/4c at $8.56 1/2 a bushel, while KCBT March climbs 22 1/2c to $9.40 and MGE March jumps 21c to $9.77. The chart below shows the UBS Bloomberg constant maturity Wheat index which confirms the vicious loop of what surging prices and geopolitical instability means to wheat prices. The higher the prices, the greater the scramble by developing (and soon developed) countries to acquire as much wheat as possible and hoard it, hoping to avoid Tunisia's fate, which of course will lead to even greater price surges. And all of this ignores the impact of the Goblin in Chief, whose money printing fetish has earned him, in our books, the adjective 'genocidal'. Once China figures out what is going on, and rice prices finally explode as we fully expect they will, the world will figure out just why...The only silver lining - soon farming will be the most profitable profession in the world.

[IsThisRealLife]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('eXpat', 'O')h, oh...
Wheat Futures At 29 Month High As Developing Country Demand Surges In Aftermath Of Tunisia Revolution

[sparky]

.
eXpat is right
"...The only silver lining - soon farming will be the most profitable profession in the world."

the historic term of trade have been hostile to farmers since the transport revolution
now , the wheel slowly turn .
Farming land is the soundest base of wealth in a sustainable economy
.

[eXpat]

Fuel instead of food.
Mexico Tempted to Shift From Tortillas to Ethanol
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'M')EXICO CITY, Jan 22, 2011 (Tierramérica) - Farmers' protests and the rise in corn tortilla prices in late December put temporary brakes on the Mexican Senate, which was preparing to lift the national ban on utilising maize to make fuel alcohol, or ethanol.

The policy shift is included in the bio-energy bill that former senator Mario López Valdez had pushed for two years. He is now governor of the northwestern state of Sinaloa. The bill was approved in committee by all political parties and presented to the Senate on Dec. 9.

The non-governmental campaign "Sin Maíz No Hay País" (roughly, "without maize, there is no Mexico") issued an alert against the legislation, which ultimately was put on hold, while in the last days of 2010 the price of the corn tortilla -- a staple in the Mexican diet -- shot up 50 percent.

Stopping the legislative effort were the senators of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which is intent on recovering the presidency in 2012, held by the conservative National Action Party (PAN) for the last two terms.

"The problem remains, though dormant, because there are many interests of (ethanol-producing) companies in the United States, Colombia and Brazil," Víctor Suárez, executive director of the National Association of Rural Commercialisation Enterprises (ANEC), told Tierramérica.

According to the federal government, Mexico imports 10 million tonnes of yellow maize annually, using it for livestock feed. It meets 30 percent of the national demand at a cost of 3 billion dollars, according to Sin Maíz No Hay País.

The insufficient national maize production was one of the reasons for the 2008 authorisation to cultivate genetically modified maize in Mexico, the cradle of this millennia-old grain.

The law bans the use of maize to make ethanol when there is a production deficit. The reform aims to replace the national ban with a regional approach, such that states with surplus maize, like Sinaloa -- where an ethanol plant is already operating, run on imported maize -- can shift it from the food market to the biofuel production market.

The argument in favour of the initiative is that the reform would benefit the small farmers in those regions, because it would allow them to sell their maize freely, without endangering Mexico's food security. Furthermore, the reasoning goes, it would reduce reliance on fossil fuels because ethanol -- utilised as a substitute for or complement to gasoline in automotive transport -- emits less climate-changing gases into the atmosphere.

[eXpat]

Food Prices Rise after Record Rains
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'B')OGOTA, Jan 26, 2011 (IPS) - Food prices are set to rise in Colombia, due to the combined effects of soaring international prices and local crop losses after nine months of devastating rains. The government expects food prices to rise three percent in February, while independent analysts forecast an increase twice as high.

"The global crisis is affecting us much more than the crop flooding, because the country imports 100 percent of the barley, lentils, peas and chickpeas it consumes, 95 percent of its wheat, 90 percent of soybeans and sorghum, and 75 percent of its maize, as well as other foods," economist Aurelio Suárez of the non-governmental organisations Unidad Cafetera and Salvación Agropecuaria told IPS.

Suárez said some 300,000 hectares out of Colombia's five million hectares of cultivated land were flooded during the last rainy season, which lasted from April to December 2010. But the Agriculture Ministry reported that 800,000 hectares were flooded, and that soil recovery will be slow.

Food price "inflation is due to importing high-priced foods," said Suárez, "but the government and agribusiness associations want to manipulate the facts and blame the lack of food security and sovereignty policies on the rains."

He was referring to the policies associated with the so-called Green Revolution, which introduced methods and technologies favoured by transnational companies into agricultural production in the mid-20th century. Added to this, according to critics of the system, the free-market economics of the 1990s replaced much local food production with vast plantations producing ingredients for biofuels.

"In Colombia, production of basic foods is declining, while oil palm, sugarcane and forestry plantations are continuously expanding," Suárez said.

[Revi]

It's very interesting that the production of biofuels is way up and the production of food is down in Colombia. What a choice! Drive or eat. It's pretty sad when people starve so others can drive around in a gas guzzler.

It sounds like everywhere in the global south (formerly the third world) is in trouble with food prices.

Could this be a preview of what will happen here?

[vision-master]

"Worthless people live only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live."
Socrates

[eXpat]

North African Unrest May Spread as Davos Delegates Warn on Food Inflation
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'R')ecord food prices may fan social unrest and fuel inflation beyond North Africa as thousands of people take to the streets of Cairo to denounce President Hosni Mubarak, delegates at the World Economic Forum said.

“This protest won’t end in North Africa; it will spread in many countries because of high unemployment and increasing food prices,” Hamza Alkholi, chairman and chief executive of Saudi Alkholi Group, a holding company investing in industrials and real estate, said in an interview in Davos, Switzerland.

Risks of global instability are rising as governments facing budget crunches cut subsidies that help the poor cope with surging food and fuel costs, the head of the United Nations’ World Food Program said two days ago. World food costs rose to a record in December on higher costs for sugar, grain and oilseeds, the UN reported Jan. 4, contributing to the uprising that ousted Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali on Jan. 14. Protests have spread to Egypt, Algeria, Morocco and Yemen.

An index of 55 food commodities tracked by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization gained for a sixth month to 214.7 points, above the previous high of 213.5 in June 2008.

Higher commodity prices are “leading to riots, demonstrations and political instability,” Nouriel Roubini, the New York University economics professor who predicted the financial crisis, said on a Davos panel. “It’s really something that can topple regimes, as we have seen in the Middle East.”

In Egypt, the world’s biggest wheat importer, three people set themselves on fire and thousands protested against President Hosni Mubarak’s government. Egyptian authorities banned protests and tightened security to prevent demonstrators from repeating the rally of Jan. 25.

In Algeria, three were killed and 420 injured at rallies against high food prices and a lack of public housing. Jordanian opposition groups have held peaceful protests against the government, and in Yemen today thousands gathered outside the main university in the capital, Sana’a, demanding that President Ali Abdullah Saleh step down.

[eXpat]

Hunger stalks children in conflict-prone Yemen
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'B')EIRUT, Jan 26 (Reuters) - Children often go hungry in Yemen. Those caught up in the poor southern Arabian nation's dizzying array of conflicts fare worse, a U.N. official said.

Yemen won sudden global attention and extra aid from the West, mostly for counter-terrorism, after a Yemen-based al Qaeda militant tried to bomb a U.S.-bound plane on Dec. 25, 2009.

That is understandable, but ignoring the plight of Yemeni youngsters short of food, education and security is not only cruel but dangerous, according to Geert Cappelaere, the Yemen representative of the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF).

Failing to meet the basic needs of Yemenis, 54 percent of whom are aged under 18, could eventually crack their resilience.

"You risk creating a growing group of young people who will revolt and become extremely violent," Cappelaere told Reuters by telephone. "The repercussions of that will not be important just for Yemen, but for the Arab region and the world as a whole."

Yemen, with multiple humanitarian emergencies cropping up across the country, offers complex challenges for President Ali Abdullah Saleh's government, foreign donors and aid agencies. "We know in parts of the north the situation is extremely dire," Cappelaere said.

[IsThisRealLife]

Now this thread is becoming selective post-whoring.

There's no doubt things are grim for millions. Food is part of the equation. But I can't offset each of these grim articles with articles of people simply being too fat too pee, and there, food can't be so scarse.