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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 9-Apr-08
Food panics and riots spread around the world

Web Log - April, 2008

Food panics and riots spread around the world

The unending sharp price wheat, corn and rice prices are destabilizing nations.

Food panic is spreading around the world, especially in the developing world, thanks to unending increasing in grain prices.

Related Articles

Food Prices
Food rationing comes to the United States: After years of price rises, mainstream media is finally recognizing there's a problem.... (24-Apr-08)

Food panics and riots spread around the world: The unending sharp price wheat, corn and rice prices are destabilizing nations.... (9-Apr-08)

UN World Food Program to institute food rationing: Surging food prices are causing food riots around the world.... (26-Feb-08)

Wheat price rises blocked by commodities market price increase limits: American wheat stockpiles are lowest since just after World War II.... (9-Feb-08)

Wheat prices surge above $10 per bushel, sparking little concern: World food stocks dwindling rapidly, according to the UN.... (23-Dec-07)

UN expert calls biofuels a "crime against humanity": Separately, Oxfam says that biofuels won't work, and they "trample" poor people.... (7-Nov-07)

United Nations warns of social unrest as food prices continue meteoric climb: With world wheat prices now up 60% since January, countries are panicking... (08-Sep-07)

World wheat prices up 30% since May on panic buying: Wheat prices hit an all-time record high, as stocks are low, and poor weather... (25-Aug-07)

The global warming fad is becoming the enemy of food production.: Food prices are continuing to increase sharply around the world.... (16-Jul-07)

Price of food is skyrocketing in India and China: In fact, crop prices are increasing around the world,... (11-Apr-07)

In Mexico, violent crime from drug cartels increases with tortilla prices: After Acapulco incident, Canada may advise citizens not to travel to Mexico.... (8-Feb-07)

UN World Food Program will cut Darfur humanitarian rations in half: This continuing genocide is a very sad situation, but it can't be stopped.... (29-Apr-06)

In a new bizarre move, North Korea demands an end to U.N. food aid: The famine-stricken country officially told the UN World Food Program... (26-Sep-05)

Food prices continue to increase dramatically around the world: Hunger, poverty and starvation are spreading to increasing masses of people around the world,... (10-Aug-05)
China appears to be approaching a major civil war : Unrest is spreading, and economic disparities make China a textbook case for a massive civil war in the making (16-Jan-2005)
Green Revolution vs Malthus Effect: Despite the "Green Revolution," world population continues to grow faster than food production. This is one of the fundamental reasons why wars occur. (28-Jun-2004)

In Haiti, at least 5 people have been killed in food riots. Hungry Haitians stormed the presidential palace Tuesday to demand the resignation of President Rene Preval over soaring food prices and U.N. peacekeepers battled rioters with rubber bullets and tear gas.

Food riots have been spreading across Africa. Forty people died during price riots in Cameroon in February. Strikes and deadly riots have also occurred in Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Senegal and Burkina Faso.

In the Philippines, any farmer caught hoarding rice risks spending the rest of his life in jail for the crime of “economic sabotage”.

India, which normally exports 4 million tons annually, imposed a ban on non-basmati rice exports to ensure that the country will have enough rice to feed its more than 1 billion people. Vietnam and Cambodia have also announced partial bans on rice exports.

In Hong Kong, which is almost entirely dependent on imported food, food panics have created rows of bare, empty shelves throughout the city. Thailand has attempted to ease the anxiety by guaranteeing food shipments.

If you want to see a lot more examples, just type "food prices" or "food riots" into Google news.

I first started writing about rising food prices in 2004, with "Food: Green revolution v Malthus effect." In 2005, I wrote an article that showed that food prices had been falling for decades, but had started to rise much faster than inflation in the year 2000.

What has happened since then has been nothing short of amazing. Food prices really started shooting up fast in 2005, even faster in 2006, faster in 2007, and now in 2008 they're going off the charts.

I November, I wrote that we must be close to a 'tipping point,' because food prices seemed to be accelerating. Now, we appear to be right at that tipping point.

Economies throughout Asia are being hard-hit by the price rises. Worldwide wheat prices have almost doubled in the last year. Rice prices have increased 20% just this year alone.

What is most amazing to me about all this is how oblivious almost everyone is to this problem. The Haiti food riots got a little coverage on the BBC, and a recent speech by World Bank president Robert B. Zoellick got a little coverage, but basically this problem is being ignored (except, of course, by the people who are actually starving).

Food prices began rising in 2000, and have been accelerating since 2004 and 2005. I've written about the reasons many times, and here's a summary of the reasons:

Generally speaking, the population is growing faster than the production of food, which means that even if the immediate problem could be solved, the bottom line is that the problem must get worse. The population explosion problem has been severely exacerbated by the success of modern medicine, and the reduction of the infant mortality rate, from 40-50% in the early 1800s to 1-2% today. This has created huge masses of young people in many places around the world, ready to go to war if they have no way to feed themselves and their children.

Even worse, the growing population has taken over farmland around the world, reducing food production even more. Generally speaking, Brazil is the only country where the amount of farmland has been steadily increasing for years -- because they've been cutting down the rain forest.

More affluent middle classes in many countries, especially India and China, have been changing their diets to eat less grain and eat more meat. The problem is that it takes more grain to feed a cow than it does to feed a human.

Crops like corn and sugar cane are being diverted away from food processing to biofuels production, supposedly to alleviate "global warming."

The Green Revolution, which WW II survivors considered a major imperative to avoid a new world war, reached its peak in the 1960s and 1970s, but has languished since then. There's almost no effort of this type today, and even the earlier technology advances are petering out as aging equipment doesn't get replaced.

Many "modern" agricultural techniques require the use of a lot more water, resulting in water shortages in many nations, including some regions of the United States. Thus, the price of water has been surging as well.

As local agricultural efforts become less effective, for all the above reasons, it's been increasingly necessary to transport food from country to country and from continent to continent. This has caused distribution costs to surge, thanks to the Law of Diminishing Returns.

Distribution becomes particularly critical when large masses of people, sometimes tens of millions of people, are packed together into huge "megacities," with no access to farmland. Families in poverty in those cities often survive by foraging in large garbage dumps for scraps of food left over by people who can afford to buy food. With worldwide food prices increasing, more and more millions of people are thrown into poverty each month, and are forced to forage in these dumps. Distributing food to the these crowded megacities requires multiple transportation links, and is extremely expensive.

All of these problems are being exacerbated by the worldwide credit crunch, which is making it increasingly difficult to borrow money to pay for food.

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, many of the above issues occur because the WW II survivors, who were very aware of the enormous dangers of allowing people to go unfed, have mostly died off, and younger generations are oblivious, believing that there's always plenty of food. It never ceases to amaze me how anyone can possibly believe this, and yet I've received a number of comments and questions from web site readers expressing exactly this view. Today's post-war generations are going to have to learn some very harsh lessons about this before too much longer.

Many people pooh-pooh the famous Essay on Population written by Thomas Roberts Malthus in 1798. This essay made the point that population grows faster than food production. People claim that Malthus has been proven wrong because there have never been the massive famines and deaths from starvation that Malthus predicted.

Malthus' error was in predicting that food scarcity would produce famines. That's wrong. Intelligent human beings don't simply lie down and die quietly when they can't feed their families. That's not what they do.

When intelligent human beings can't feed their families, they go to war. That is what I've called the "Malthus effect."

The rhetoric is familiar -- "those greedy black/white people," "those greedy tall/short people," "those greedy speculators," "those greedy Muslims/Christians/Jews," "those greedy capitalists," "those greedy Communists," "those greedy immoral idolaters," etc., etc. Whatever the reason is, it amounts to one group identifying another group from whom food will be demanded, on pain of war.

Dear Reader, the rise in food prices which has been going on for eight years now is truly historic, and will have historic consequences.

As more and more people in the world are forced into poverty and starvation because of the Malthus Effect, the political state of the world is becoming increasingly unstable. Generational Dynamics predicts that we're headed for a new "clash of civilizations" world war, and it will happen sooner rather than later. (9-Apr-08) Permanent Link
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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 9-Apr-08 Food panics and riots spread around the world

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 9-Apr-08
Food panics and riots spread around the world