We Are Now One Year Away From Global Riots, Complex Systems Theorists Say
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motherboard.vice.com
If you are reading these words, and you are a parent of young children, I want you to conduct a thought experiment: Imagine you have no food in your home, zero. Add to that you have enough money for one meal a day to be shared with your kids. Your children are hungry and you can not feed them. Add to that everyone on your block or neighborhood being as hungry as you are. Got this picture? Now answer this question: Is there anything you would not do to feed your hungry kids, stop them from crying?
edit: World food prices in total rose 25 percent in 2010.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2011/jan/23/foo...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-24/speculation-swings-...
I don't have kids, but I did a fast of only juice for a week so I know a bit what it is to feel hungry. It makes you to strange things.
edit: why the down votes?
I just don't see it happening. There is a long long way to go between the current living standards people enjoy and literally no food.
Isn't this like saying "Anonymous professes _____ and does not ______?" Anyone can call themselves "Occupiers."
Food is pretty much a solved problem, at least in the US. It used to take virtually the entire country's labor to feed itself. Now agriculture is a single-digit percentage of the workforce.
Of course we can debate whether what's on the supermarket shelves should really be called "food," but for most Americans the question has been settled to their satisfaction. There aren't going to be any food riots in the US.
However, Occupiers also always have free autonomy as individuals.
"food is taken care of in the USA" Not for poor children. Not for homeless mentally ill people who don't take their medication. Not for elderly who live on fixed incomes during the Winter. There is much shameful hunger in the USA.
AGain ? Do you hear dozens of people dying from starvation everyday in the papers?
Starvation has a cause of death is like almost nil in all modern countries. You should be more worried about obesity, diabetes as morbidity-leaders among all categories you mentioned.
Food is not a dichotomy.
No, because it's not news. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr60/nvsr60_03.pdf There were 2,850 deaths in the USA directly from malnutrition in 2009. That's almost 1 per 100,000 people, every year. That's more than twice as many as Hodgkin's disease.
Meals at home consisted of some "creative" variants of government cheese (yeah, it actually existed. The blocks in the cardboard wrappers.), egg noodles, cheap and expired white bread and milk or milk powder.
We'd go to these stores, which you may not be aware of, but they sell expired food at steep discounts. It wasn't like a grocery store with stuff neatly displayed. Everything was dumped into giant bins and you dug through them. We felt like scavengers. For a long time, I knew how long after expiration each food time was good for.
My only saving grace was stealing food and the free school lunches which sometimes provided fruit and some variance to my meals. But that still wasn't enough and I wasn't hungry in the "boy, I could use a sandwich!" way you might be familiar with, I was hungry hungry.
I don't really want to blame anyone, but the fact of the matter is that there are kids in this country, who through no fault of their own, suffer.
Typically, households classified as having very low food security experienced the condition in 7 months of the year, for a few days in each of those months.
that is from 1968
The nature of Occupy may or may not be benign. The nature of social groups under Maslow pressures (fundamental hierarchy of needs) tends to be not so good.
As for food production in the US: it's a solved problem, with ample water, copious amounts of fossil fuels and fossil-derived fertilizers, utilizing soil-mining and -depleting methods, and monoculture agriculture. Climate change, drought, petroleum price spikes (though nominally coal and oil shale could probably provide for ag needs pretty trivially), or pests (insects, fungus, or others) could all have severe impacts on ag production. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s carried off as much as 75% of the topsoil (the organic substrate on top of bedrock in which crops grow). Changes in ag methods have greatly reduced, but not stopped, topsoil loss.
I agree that near-term food riots in the US are unlikely. With a broader time horizon, I wouldn't rule them out. Near-term issues are likely to arise in the same regions they have in the recent past (see chart in source article).
Food costs money and the poor have been hit much harder by this recession than the middle class.
American cities require hourly supplies to be sustained. If something disrupted the distribution of food American cites would become mini-hells. Remember hurricane Catrina's aftermath?
(Rising food prices sparked the Arab Spring)
edit: 50-million Americans, including nine million children, will go to bed tonight without having had enough to eat
http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err-economic-research-r...
I suppose if the food system collapsed completely (and that is possible considering the way we grow most of our food (monoculture) - but very unlikely) that would be catastrophic. It would have to happen not just in one area, though. To really effect us all.
In that case grab your gun. And protect your own garden.
I think this study is predicting food riots in certain areas. Highly possible.
In addition, I found this statement concluding the article to be completely lacking support: "And it’s only going to get worse and worse and worse."
Why should we expect food prices / rioting to get worse and worse?
From our standpoint, technology and automation will get better and better, bringing the price of many things down.
Humans have demonstrated their ability to adapt to change.
And that realization only comes after some big wars, famines and disasters.
There are only a few instances where we have changed proactively.
Humans have always needed a wake up call.
Corn prices are actually expected to hold steady until July of next year and then go down: http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/agricultural/grain-and-oilse...
People have been predicting future behavior of complex systems for ever, and they are always wrong. Its very strange at first but it arises from the challenge of predicting things you don't know a-priori.
The Indian government could (not that they will but could) nationalize several million hectares of arable land and apply modern farming technology to them. Would double the amount of food. China's modernization program is resulting steadily growing production [2].
The price of food rises, and the production of food rises as well. Complex systems respond to a variety of inputs, not particularly easy to predict their collapse unless you can show something which can force them into failure.
[1] "According to the latest FAO report, the average yield of rice in India is 2.3 tonne/ha as against the global average of 4.374 tonne/ha. " http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-04-02/news...
[2] http://jxb.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/05/06/jxb.e...
Distribution is a huge problem. Often moving food from point A to B is so expensive the economics of it just don't make any sense.
You can double you production. But what good will that do if the cost of moving it to hungry masses is not feasible? So really its not so complex, at the end it all boils down to a term called 'energy' and we just keep going in rounds around it.
Actually, in India, it doesn't. The energy intensity of an ideal distribution network in India has a fraction of the friction of the existing system. For the case provided it boils down to efficacy of governance, corruption, and transparency.
See the previous topic on folks starving in India not because of a lack of food but because of corruption. So I could totally buy into the idea that people will riot and assert their right to be governed in the presence of mass corruption which prevents them from eating. It worked for Mao and it has worked for others. Its easy to incite someone who is hungry and cannot afford food to riot (systemic input). So it becomes a priority for the government to avoid that, lest it lose its authority (systemic response).
Riots are when masses 'give up' and resort to something else.
Needless to say the entire western world is very far away from it.
Occupy protests are not riots despite all the police in riot suits standing around sweating.
Just open any newspaper from 20-30-40 years ago, you will see a picture of a world full of conflicts and disorder everywhere.
This being said, I do believe there are "triggers" that may help people to riot, and the price of food may be one. By the way, food pricing and "hunger" are two different things. Noone was suffering from Hunger in Egypt when they rioted. Let's call a cat a cat. I love when people write about "Hunger" while they live in a world where noone around them have experienced hunger once in their lives. Don't USE words you do NOT understand.
And this article is BS anyway, since the author throws some global warming salt together with some "evil speculators" pepper. Making a link between drought and global warming, maybe, without any clear explanation ? Droughts have ALWAYS happened in History, even when we did not produce carbon. Strange huh ?
The intensity of the Egyptian riots is very much connected to general poverty and food scarcity in large parts of Egypt, though not uniformaly. Cairo is a different circumstance. None the less, your point is incorrect.
You see riots, demonstrations in western countries when prices for petrol or commodities rise, but that does not mean that the situation is necessarily unbearable.
By the way, price food increase has also a lot to do with the US government debt and the weakness of the US dollar (inflation) leading to increasing $ needed to buy the same amount of food over time. And poorer countries are directly impacted by this.
Cities are already faced with huge crisis for water. The under ground water tables are depleting like crazy. There are villages which practically have no water at all, they have to go around nearby villages to scout for water. There are some states like Tamil Nadu, where water crisis is so imminent, if Karnataka and Kerala were to stop releasing water they would be in serious trouble. But this is not limited just to one state. The rivers are heavily polluted, and beyond any meaningful usage. In the name of development and growth, lakes and ponds and cities have been converted to spaces for buildings and urban infrastructure. In early days nearly every village used to have a lake, that culture vanished with appearance of tube wells. People are paying a high price for that culture. This is likely to affect nearly every aspect of India life.
With irrigation methods belonging to old stone age and population on an upward trend. This is a classic recipe for disaster.
You may have your mobile phones, PC's, iPods and jeans pants. But without food and water none of it is going to every workout well.
Thank you for sharing this Kamaal.
Peru's water problems are real, and not easily summed up i the term "privitization:" http://www.economist.com/node/5526571
Thank you for the links.
All water is portable, but not all water is potable.
This is a really easy mistake to make, especially if English isn't your first language, because the words are very very similarly spelled and pronounced.
(And sorry, I'm not trying to nitpick. I'm sure everybody knows what you mean, just pointing this out in case you want to know)
A better conclusion would be "rising food prices make riots easier to incite". The reason for the false assumption is the notion that the Arab Spring was largely leaderless or organic; it was not.
Most of the Arab Spring protests were encouraged and incited by the Muslim Brotherhood. The crippled economies were an excellent motivator for people to take to the streets - they did, after all, not have any work to do.
However, food prices were only a small piece of the puzzle that made the countries ripe for unrest. Many other components helped it along, including our country's naive actions.
Err.. citation required?
The Arab Spring riots in Morocco, Libya, Tunisia and Egypt certainly weren't, although the Muslim Brotherhood did become involved in some cases once the protests were going.
Only in Jordan did the Muslim Brotherhood do anything that could be classed as "inciting"[1], and that was mostly unsuccessful.
The conventional wisdom for the organisation (such as it was) of the Arab Spring protests (especially in Egypt) is that it mostly had origins in the Otpor![2] movement in Serbia, and followed the model used by protesters in the Ukraine and in Georgia[3].
The later domination of the Egyptian government by the Muslim Brotherhood was due to a political miscalculation by the two main moderate groups (basically they lost votes to each other, giving the Muslim Brotherhood party enough votes to make the run-off poll)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring#Summary_of_conflict...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otpor!
[3] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/03/the-revo...
In a few months, that same cut of beef will be 250-400% higher.
When grain gets expensive, feeding animals becomes expensive. Raising them becomes unprofitable, so farmers dump their animals onto the market which 1) lowers the price of meat 2) makes a large number of meat calories available for human consumption when they are needed most and 3) reduces the demand for grain, dampening the price rise for grain.
This effect has mostly replaced the need for the long-term grain storage that countries used to do.
So why isn't working now? One word: ethanol. President Obama could single-handedly stop the current food crisis by eliminating or suspending ethanol subsidies and mandates.
B: What Malthusian crisis? He's been thoroughly discredited.
C: That's like saying eating will delay death. It will, just keep on delaying it every day.
It matters because subsistence living is probably not compatible with a high-tech society.
In the long run, population grows to the limits of resources. Natural selection always selects for more descendants, and the population always hits the resource limits. The only alternative is for natural selection to cease operating.
Incidentally, population growth has not flatlined uniformly in First World countries. There are identifiable subgroups that have very high fecundity, and whose descendants are capable of eating any possible green revolution within a few centuries at the most.
We're now in an age where energy is cheap, and energy can be converted to food relatively easily. The amount of energy required to feed the entire world is now a small fraction of total world energy production. The fact that we don't do it this way is only because food is even cheaper than energy.
And yes, our oil energy supplies are relatively constrained, but our alternative supplies (aka nuclear) are not.
So "any possible green revolution" is pretty darn big. If we wanted to, we could feed a trillion people using nuclear power lighting artificial greenhouses.
This is the reason so many science fiction stories are set on a future Earth that is baking hot (industrial waste heat) and has fertility police that terminate unlicensed pregnancies. It's a simple extrapolation of current conditions.
So it doesn't matter how many humans you have, there will always be enough resources.
Remember that from a physical point of view nothing can ever be destroyed. The only thing that happens is the atom moves from one place to another. With application of energy and brains, you can move that atom right back to where you want it.
No. There are hard limits to resources, but exponential growth curves have no upper bounds.
For example, humans could disassemble all the planets in the Solar system and turn them into space stations, increasing the habitable area by a factor of a trillion trillion. For a population doubling time of 20 years, the new territory will be filled up in a few thousand years. If we convert all the solid matter in the galaxy into space stations, the galaxy will hit the Malthusian limit within a few million years. The only solution to an exponential growth curve is starvation or artificial selection.
> The remainder is consumed by animals and by
> industrial processes.
Also, if livestock is what regulates the grain market, then why do grain-producers get such large (non-ethanol-related) subsidies?
No, but it is suitable for turning into meal, which is how corn is consumed in the third world, or into HFCS which is how corn is consumed in the first world.
For other grains, it mostly works in the other direction in normal years. For example, a farmer may try to grow wheat suitable for bread, but it rains while the crop is in windrow, making it unsuitable for bread due to its low protein content. It's graded as "feed" and fed to animals in a normal year. However, you can still make bread from it, it just doesn't rise as well.
"why do grain-producers get such large (non-ethanol-related) subsidies?" Because farmer's causes are sympathetic to voters for various different reasons. (historical attachment, enjoyment of low food prices, stereotyping of farmers as close to the land, lower populations in rural districts, and many others)
So while livestock do account for much water use, it's not a simple switch to grains and the world will be rainbows.
> I know in Australia much of the grazing land will
> not support growing crops.
> And it is also worth considering popular crops too that
> use significant amounts of water like rice and cotton.
> So while livestock do account for much water use, it's not a
> simple switch to grains and the world will be rainbows.
Also, comments like "and the world will be rainbows" are a little condescending.