Even before the Arab Spring erupted in Tunisia in 2010, analysts at
the New England Complex Systems Institute warned of the danger of
civil unrest due to escalating food prices.
(http://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2013/mar/06/food-riots-new-normal)
(http://www.theguardian.com/environment/food)
If the Food & Agricultural Organisation (FAO) food price index
rises above 210, they warned, it could trigger riots across large
areas of the world.
Unfortunately,
simply taking to the streets isn't the answer to high food prices.
What is needed is a meaningful civilisational transition model like
Myhouseinparadise.
Hunger
games
The
pattern is clear.
Food price spikes in 2008 coincided with the eruption of social
unrest in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Somalia, Cameroon, Mozambique,
Sudan, Haiti, and India, among others.
In
2011, the price spikes preceded social unrest across
the Middle East and North Africa - Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Oman, Saudi
Arabia, Bahrain, Libya, Uganda, Mauritania, Algeria, and so on.
Last
year saw food prices reach their third highest year on record
(http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/212018/icode/),
corresponding to the latest outbreaks of street violence and protests
in Argentina, Brazil, Bangladesh, China, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey and
elsewhere.
Since
about a decade ago, the FAO food price index has more than doubled
from 91.1 in 2000 to an average of 209.8 in 2013.
As Prof Yaneer Bar-Yam, founding president of the Complex Systems
Institute, told Vice magazine
( http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/a-complex-systems-model-predicted-the-revolutions-sweeping-the-globe-right
)
last week:
"Our
analysis says that 210 on the FAO index is the boiling point and
we have been hovering there for the past 18 months...
In some of the cases the link is more explicit, in others, given
that we are at the boiling point, anything will trigger unrest."