The New Geopolitics of Food (1)

Lester Brown, one of the great thinkers of our time, is linking the concept of geopolitics with that of food. Indeed, nowadays, it seems that geopolitical aspect is determined by food. A doubling in the world price of wheat actually means that the wheat you carry home from the market to handgrind into flour for chapatis costs twice as much. And the same is true for rice. If the world price of rice doubles, so does the price of rice in your neighborhood market in Jakarta. And so does the cost of the bowl of boiled rice on an Indonesian family's dinner table.
Prices are climbing, but the impact is not at all being felt equally. For Americans, who spend less than 1/10 of their income in the supermarket, the soaring food prices are not a calamity. But for the planet's poorest 2 billion people, who spend 50 to 70% of their income on food, these soaring prices may mean going from 2 meals a day to one.
The new geopolitics of food looks a whole lot more volatile than it used to. Scarcity is the new norm. Until recently, sudden price surges just didn't matter as much, as they were quickly followed by a return to the relatively low food prices that helped shape the political stability of the late 20th century across much of the globe. But now both the causes and consequences are ominously different. Historically, price spikes tended to be almost exclusively driven by unusual weather, a monsoon failure in India, a drought in the former Soviet Union, a heat wave in the US Midwest. Such events are always disruptive, but thankfully infrequent. Unfortunately, today's price hikes are driven by trends that are both elevating demand and making it moredifficult to increase production. Among them are a rapidly expanding population, a crop-withering temperature increases, and irrigation wells running dry. Each night, there are 219, 000 additional people to feed at the global dinner table.
More alarming still, the world is losing its ability to soften the effect of shortages. In response to previous price surges, the US, the world's largest grain producer, was effectively able to steer the world away from potential catastrophe. From the mid-20th century until 1995, the US had either grain surpluses or idle cropland that could be plantes to rescue countries in trouble. That's why the food crisis of 2011 is for real, and why it may bring with it more bread riots and political revolutions. What if the upheavals that greeted dictators Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak in Egipt, and Muammar al Qaddafi in Libya (a country that imports 90% of its grain) are not the end of the story, but the beginning of it.

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