Riot shield used as a tea tray (Image by pixel.eight).
I was busy revising two papers last week in view of (re)submitting them before the semester starts, so I didn’t spend much time on the UK riots. Besides, I didn’t think I had anything smart to say about them and I still don’t, given that my own work on riots has largely been about food riots in developing countries. So I will let others do the talking:
Some Thoughts on Food Prices and Famine
Tom Murphy had an interesting post on food prices last week in which he discussed how food prices remain very high, but how they are not the only culprit behind the current famine in the Horn of Africa. At the end of his post, Tom wrote that he hoped I would comment on the role of food prices and agriculture.
Sadly, I have very little to add. In June, the price of food was 39 percent higher than a year earlier, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations.
But given that the FAO’s food price index encompasses five categories of food, this statistic masks a considerable amount of heterogeneity. Looking at the five categories that make up the food price index, we get the following price increases: