Food Insecurity: The Basic Threat in an Overburdened Region

[Crabtownboy]

Nothing is as simply as many would lead us to believe concerning unrest and terror in the Mid-East. Here is another factor causing unrest in the Mid-East.

Since the 1980s, after two decades of low and stable international food prices, the world's agricultural commodities markets began to experience the effects of a number of structural factors that had been silently increasing the prices of basic food commodities. By the second half of 2008, when the world's economy was hit by an unanticipated financial meltdown, the global food-price crisis had already set in. The latter's impacts and long-term effects were much more universal and pervasive than those of the former. Despite how interconnected many parts of the world's financial markets were, many countries were neither directly nor deeply, if at all, involved in the highly complex financial practices and products adopted by the giant U.S. and European institutions whose collapse triggered the markets' crash. This was not the case for agricultural and food-commodity markets. All over the world people depended in one form or another on these markets, whether as consumers, producers, or both.

About three years later, one Arab country after another started to boil over into street protests. In Tunisia and Egypt, they quickly turned into mass uprisings; in Syria, Libya and Yemen, into protracted upheavals. Average per capita income in these countries (except Libya) was about 10 percent (Yemen), 20 percent (Egypt and Syria), and 50 percent (Tunisia) of the world's average throughout 2008-12 (no meaningful data is available for Syria past 2010).1 That a global food crisis of the magnitude experienced in 2007-08 would culminate in significant wide-spread socioeconomic stress in those Arab countries would have been predictable — had the dynamics of developments in the commodities and financial markets and the interconnected pressures they placed on these Arab economies been watched closely. This is not about hindsight. Riots and protests on a much smaller scale have broken out in various countries when liberalization policies affected food or energy markets, energy prices affecting all other economic activities and people's purchasing power, including the affordability of food. And there are examples of much worse food-insecurity situations where similar protests did not break out, but famine set in and people died. It was inevitable that the global food-price crisis would have serious material consequences on the ground in low-middle-income Arab countries.

The Arab countries that have remained engulfed in turmoil since 2011 or that are still in transition from economic and political fragility continue to be vulnerable to external pressures arising from the agricultural commodities market. On one hand, many of the factors that had driven prices steeply upward in agricultural commodities and food markets until they aligned with other global economic conditions to create intolerable inflation and a food security crisis did not go away. On the other hand, the Arab populations whose food security the food-price inflation was bound to undermine in 2007-08 are economically worse off today than they were at the dawn of the first uprising in 2011. Many are much worse off..

http://www.mepc.org/journal/middle-...d-insecurity-basic-threat-overburdened-region

 

[church mouse guy]

As you know, Islamic theology believes in kismet and there is therefore vast indifference about the plight of the poor inside the Islamic temple of doom theology.

When Egypt had a Jewish administrator of agriculture, there was a well-managed surplus; but under Islam, Egypt has had to depend upon the largess of the American taxpayer.

Recently it was pointed out about the high price of hamburger in this country, to which one Democrat replied let them eat cake.

Islam, with their backward science, needs to stop the wars and terrorism and learn the ways of agriculture such as displayed in Israel, the land of milk and honey. (The Democrat stronghold of California is the land of fruits and nuts.)