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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 5-Feb-2011
5-Feb-11 News -- Food prices surge +3.4% in January to fresh historic highs

Web Log - February, 2011

5-Feb-11 News -- Food prices surge +3.4% in January to fresh historic highs

Iran's Supreme Leader takes credit for 'Islamic Awakening' in Egypt and Tunisia

Iran's current supreme leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, says that the Tunisia revolution and the Egypt uprising are a result of Iran's 1979 Great Islamic Revolution, according to state run Press Tv. Khamanei said the following during Friday prayers:

"Today, developments in North Africa, [including] Egypt, Tunisia and some other countries have a special meaning for the Iranian nation.
This is what was always referred to as the Islamic awakening created by the victory of the great Revolution of the Iranian nation. ...
In Tunisia, which is a Muslim nation with a long Islamic history with great Muslim scholars coming from Tunisia; people had to carry a special card to go to mosques under Ben Ali's rule, a card that the government did not give to everyone. ...
As soon as this traitor (Ben Ali) fled, female students went to university wearing hijab. ...
[Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is the] lackey of the Zionist regime [Israel]."

According to the article, he added that Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was a tool in the hands of the US, and that the US and Israel have become helpless in the face of freedom-seeking Egyptians. He said that defeat awaits the US and Israel in Tunisia and Egypt.

There's a lot of dark humor associated with this story, after Khamenei's government massacred Iranian protesters last year.

It never ceases to astonish me that the Iranian leadership, including Khamenei and president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, actually believe that the Sunni Arab states are going to allow Iran to be their leader, just as the Caliphate in Istanbul in Ottoman Turkey used to be their leader.

This policy is particularly outlandish in the case of supplying money and weapons to Hamas. Hamas will, of course, happily take their free money and weapons. (If Iran offered me free money, I'd take it too.)

But Sunni Muslim Gazans will never side with Iran against their fellow Arabs. The only country that the Sunni Arabs hate more than Israel is Iran.

Food prices surge +3.4% in January to fresh historic highs

World food prices surged to a new historic peak in January, for the seventh consecutive month, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

FAO Food Price Index - 1991 - January 2011

FAO Food Price Index - 1991 - January 2011

Food prices were already at historic highs in December. Many politicians were predicting that food prices would start to fall again by now, as the result of new rice and wheat crops. Instead, food prices surged by 3.4% in one month, with almost all categories showing increases.

According to FAO economist Abdolreza Abbassian, moderation in food prices is nowhere to be seen:

"The new figures clearly show that the upward pressure on world food prices is not abating. These high prices are likely to persist in the months to come. High food prices are of major concern especially for low-income food deficit countries that may face problems in financing food imports and for poor households which spend a large share of their income on food.
The only encouraging factor so far stems from a number of countries, where - due to good harvests - domestic prices of some of the food staples remain low compared to world prices."

The last sentence is very weird, and it just goes to show how screwed up these politicians are. He's saying that it's good news that food prices in some countries are lower than average world prices. Good news, right?

But that means that food prices in some other countries must be HIGHER than average world prices.

Well, despite the spin, high and surging food prices are the most destabilizing factor in the world today.

If you search the news, you can find that there are news stories about how almost every country in the world is adversely affected. Just to take one example, Reuters reports that Bangladesh's food inflation rate was 11.01% in December, which they blame on hoarding, speculating and panic buying. So Bangladesh is going to do some panic buying itself, and purchasing 100,000 tonnes of wheat, rather than the previously planned 50,000 tonnes, putting the excess into storage. This kind of panic buying will push prices even higher.

Prices of vegetables and fruits have almost doubled in Saudi Arabia, because most of those products are imported from Egypt, which is in chaos, according to the Arab News. Problems have been made even worse because some city warehouses in south Jeddah were flooded last week.

As I've written many times, most recently in "10-Jan-11 News -- Governments around the world struggle with increasing food prices," food prices have been rising steadily since 2002, with no end in sight.

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, what we're seeing is what I call the "Malthus effect," a continuing increase in the price of food as the population grows faster than the supply of food, especially during a generational Crisis era.

Additional links

In answering questions from reporters this week, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said that the Fed was not to blame for food price inflation. CS Monitor

Anti-government protesters in Cairo, Egypt, were jubilant on Friday, even though they didn't achieve their primary objective of forcing president Hosni Mubarak to step down. The pro-government protesters, with whom they had fought in previous days, had disappeared, and the army protected the anti-government protesters. They sang protest songs, changed anti-Mubarak slogans, and promised to remain in Tahrir Square until Mubarak leaves. VOA

The PKK terrorist group in Turkey was thought to have been subdued, but 2010 was a very "successful" year for them, with 90 Turkish soldiers and dozens of civilians killed in terrorist attacks. ISN

There's an interesting story about how tribal elders in the Sangin district in Afghanistan, who are supposedly Taliban sympathizers, have turned against the Taliban (presumably Pakistani Taliban, though that's not mentioned). This is consistent with the fact that Afghanistan is in a generational Recovery era, with no desire for war. (See "6-Jan-11 News -- Pakistan melts down as US/Nato forces struggle in Afghanistan.") Independent

The Cambodian "Killing Fields" civil war of the 1970s was a generational crisis war for both Cambodia and Thailand. Now, as both countries are in generational Awakening eras, some border violence is flaring up again. Xinhua

As European officials continue to meet and try to figure out how to head off the next major crisis, a lot of resentment is growing against German Chancellor Angela Merkel because "the solution seems to be relatively simple: for the eurozone to thrive in its second decade, Spain, Greece, Italy and all the rest need to turn into Germany.." Guardian

Tens of thousands of people in Yemen held street protests for Thursday's "Day of Rage." There were both anti- and pro-government protesters. Reuters

Home prices in China, already at bubble levels, rose another 1% in January, the biggest one month gain in six months. Bloomberg

(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 5-Feb-11 News -- Food prices surge +3.4% in January to fresh historic highs thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be posted anonymously.) (5-Feb-2011) Permanent Link
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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 5-Feb-2011 5-Feb-11 News -- Food prices surge +3.4% in January to fresh historic highs

Iran's Supreme Leader takes credit for 'Islamic Awakening' in Egypt and Tunisia

Food prices surge +3.4% in January to fresh historic highs

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 5-Feb-2011
5-Feb-11 News -- Food prices surge +3.4% in January to fresh historic highs