[deMolay]

This is a report prepared by a Japanese Investment Bank Nokumora. Is your country on the list? http://www.businessinsider.com/nomura-f ... sis-2010-9

[wisconsin_cur]

I would have ordered them differently (Philippines is higher on my list, Ukraine lower for two examples) but, otherwise, looks about right.

[Pretorian]

Ukraine with 1/4th of the world's blacksoils and a population decreasing by 1000 a day is worse off than Vietnam, with twice as little land and twice as many people , that is adding 3000 bread-cutters a day. Yeah, I would close my account with Nokumura, if they are paying for reports like these.

[deMolay]

The Ukraines problem is mostly related to energy and proximity to Russia.

[americandream]

Please tell me, this isn't Mr In Denial Japan. The same Japan that scours the worlds oceans for its vast seafooods markets, the same Japan that feels the need to carry on reasearch on whales without a decent explanaton, the same Japan that flushes it's condoms, plastic bags, party ballons and other signs of affluence down the sewer into the Pacific, the same Japan that revels in a robotised, mechanised excuse for human society whilst engorging on shared resources as if they were going out of fashion.

Oh well, at least theres hari kari I guess.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('deMolay', 'T')his is a report prepared by a Japanese Investment Bank Nokumora. Is your country on the list? http://www.businessinsider.com/nomura-f ... sis-2010-9

[hillsidedigger]

What about Ethiopia and Egypt?

I would place Mexico pretty high on that list unless they are to receive great aid from their Northern neighbors. After all there are 7 times as many Mexicans as there were just 70 years ago but only 5.75 times as many in Mexico for the others are in the United States.

[wisconsin_cur]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('hillsidedigger', 'W')hat about Ethiopia and Egypt?

[sparky]

.
the list is totally bogus , they even list countries which are food exporters
a poor country with food sufficiency is going to be OK
so is a rich country like Hongkong , ( it's not a country actually )
they can easily buy food on the open market
but even then some marginal , like the pensioners and the very poor will suffer

The worst will be in poor countries cities , and in the overpopulated ones
most of the middle East cannot feed itself

[hillsidedigger]

What about Peru which is on the verge of running out of freshwater?

Just say Africa, South Asia and latin America.

I wonder why Eastern European countries are on that list for they have plenty of farmland and a history of productive subsistance farming.

[Shar_Lamagne]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'E')gypt, struggling to consolidate a revolution that deposed President Hosni Mubarak in February, faces what could be even worse turmoil because the country is running out of food as well as the money to buy it.

Food prices went up 10.7 percent in April compared to the same month in 2010, government statistics indicate.
At the same time, Egypt's annual urban inflation rate surged past 12 percent in April, underlining how key factors that triggered the popular uprising that forced Mubarak from office after 30 years remain in play.

A dozen other Arab states were roiled by similar uprisings, some much less intense than Egypt's. But food prices and related economic grievances played a big part in these upheavals, unprecedented in modern Middle Eastern history.

Three other Arab dictators teeter on the brink: Moammar Gadhafi of civil war-wracked Libya, Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen -- whose country is actually running out of water and on the cusp of critical food shortages -- and Bashar Assad of Syria who has sent tanks into the streets to crush protests in which demonstrators howled for his removal.

Egypt imports half its wheat and the collapse of its external credit means starvation," Asia Times Online observed May 10. "The civil violence we have seen … foreshadows far worse to come. The Arab uprisings began against a background of food insecurity, as rising demand from Asia priced the Arab poor out of the grain market.

"The chaotic political response, though, threatens to disrupt food supplies in the relative near term. Street violence will become the norm rather than the exception in Egyptian politics."

This bleak assessment in Asia Times Online's Spengler column was underlined by a warning from Ahmad al-Rakaibi, head of Egypt's Holding Company for Food Industries, of "acute shortage in the production of food commodities manufactured locally as well as a decline in imports of many goods, especially poultry, meat and oil."

Egypt is reported to have only four months' supply of wheat on hand and only one month's supply of rice. According to Al-Ahram, Egypt's leading daily, hoarding of rice by wholesalers has pushed prices up by 35 percent this year.

Egypt's foreign exchange reserves have fallen by $13 billion, or roughly one-third, in the first quarter of the year amid a flight of capital.

Rising food prices is a global problem but the Middle East is particularly at high risk because of chronically high levels of unemployment and low incomes. Mushrooming populations are an added factor. Arab countries have among the highest population growth rates in the world. The overall Arab population was 73 million in 1950. Today, it's more than four times that at 333 million.

Following the 2008 food price crisis, which triggered bread riots in Arab cities, some regional states, increased public sector wages and sought to aid the poor by increasing bread subsidies. But those measures weren't sustainable without increased revenues, which weren't forthcoming. The non-oil producers all have fiscal and trade deficits.

The wealthy oil states of the Persian Gulf produce little food and import 85 percent of basic food requirements.The regional states have little arable land and even less water and worsening climate change will make their food situation even more precarious.

[EnergyUnlimited]

Nothing unexpected here.

These days uprisings will in general lead to reduced life standards, regardless of wishes of revolutionaries.

[EnergyUnlimited]

Essentially this sequence will lead to Mad Max world in areas where applied.
Revolutions will only accelerate societal destruction, what now can be seen in Egypt.

Edit:
For me it seems that an optimal way forward would take a form of weak and toothless central government, relatively strong local authorities, all that in absence of revolutions.

[Serial_Worrier]

For all the doomer talk, it seems that real doom is only happening in 3rd world hellholes where capitalism and republican institutions do not exist.

[Pretorian]

1 m worth of rice and 4 m worth of wheat-- did they calculate an increased demand for wheat after the rice would be gone?So what they will start begging in 10 weeks or so?

[pup55]

At times like this we consult the CIA World Factbook:

Egypt, one of the cradles of civilization, has about 1 million square km of land area of which only 2.92 percent is arable, that is you can plant crops on it. Its population is 82 million which means that there are 2800 people per arable square km. We have done some calculations in the past to the effect that when nations get much over 1000 they tend to be pretty miserable and start having problems. With Egypt, there used to be an economy capable of a $6000 per capita GDP, so they managed to import enough food to feed everybody. Also, their birth rate is about 24 per 1000, compared to about 13 for the US, so their population is growing way too fast, like it is all over the arab/muslim world, where they keep their women undereducated and pregnant.

The delightful nation of Haiti, which a year or two ago made news because its population having to eat clay to fill their stomachs up has 1243 per square km. Their per capita GDP is only $1200 so they obviously cannot afford to import food. That must be the difference.

I am glad I live in the overfed USA where obesity is the number one problem, and people whine about how bad they have it, at 173 people per square km. I think Germany and Mexico are near the 800's.

http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/politic ... gn-aid.htm

According to this, the US gives them nearly $1.5B in aid every year, and in this article it says that Egypt and Israel amount to nearly 1/3 of our total foreign aid donations, which is pretty comical, actually, we actually are buying the peace between these two nations, which I guess is a hell of a lot cheaper than sending the marines over there as we found out in Iraq. But at least they are spending it mostly on the military...I guess...



Thank goodness we're not responsible for half of their population being reproductive age and the whole thing set to blow up.

http://globalis.gvu.unu.edu/indicator_d ... Country=EG

Actually the population has only doubled since we started giving them aid in the 70's, and the real explosion is still about a generation away. It's their fault that this happened, right? right?

[vtsnowedin]

It seems obvious to me that some forty million Egyptians are soon to die and there is nothing anyone in the western world can do that will do more then postpone it a few years. For example If the USA was to stop converting corn to ethanol and shipped it to Egypt (Without bothering to figure out how to pay for that) all that would happen is that the Egyptian birth rate would stay the same or increase so that in a few years one hundred million Egyptians would be starving instead of eighty million and by then the US will have had to figure out the pay scheme and will no doubt have to stop sending aid.
Their only hope is to immediately drop their birth rate to half of replacement and there is not the political or religious will to do that even if they see the reality of it.
I expect a very very bloody civil war to break out soon or perhaps a desperate attack on a neighboring state with more resources.

[Pretorian]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('vtsnowedin', '
')I expect a very very bloody civil war to break out soon or perhaps a desperate attack on a neighboring state with more resources.

[PrestonSturges]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'W')hat you gonna do when the oil goes dry?
Gonna sit right there and watch those Arabs die.

- W.S. Burroughs (1959)