From an article by Lester R. Brown in the May/June issue of Foreign Policy:
“That’s why the food crisis of 2011 is for real, and why it may bring with it yet more bread riots cum political revolutions. What if the upheavals that greeted dictators Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya (a country that imports 90 percent of its grain) are not the end of the story, but the beginning of it? Get ready, farmers and foreign ministers alike, for a new era in which world food scarcity increasingly shapes global politics.”
I’m glad someone is finally calling it what it is — a food crisis. Since December 2010, the food price index published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has been higher than it ever was during the food crisis of 2008. why not use the same terminology as was used back then?
I disagree with Brown’s neo-Malthusian conclusions, but his article does an excellent job at surveying the multiple issues one should keep in mind when thinking about food prices in relation to politics. As such, it is a worthwhile read on the topic.
(HT: Chris Barrett.)