Democratic Nostalgia: Truman Edition

If you stay at home, as you did in 2010, and keep these reactionaries in power, you'll deserve every blow you get!

Remember--Tuesday is Soylent Green Day

Governor Santini is brought to you today by Soylent Red, and Soylent Yellow. And, new, delicious, Soylent Green: The "miracle food" of high energy plankton, gathered from the oceans of the world. Due to its enormous popularity, Soylent Green is in short supply, so remember—Tuesday is Soylent Green day.

I hate to make two Soylent Green references in a row but this time it's really apropos. If you're not familiar with the sci-fi classic (and, really, by now you should be--rent it from the library, Netflix it, whatever), it offers a dystopic vision of the year 2022--an overpopulated, environmentally devastated planet in which food is scarce (leading to desperate measures!). Far-fetched stuff.

How's the food picture looking in the real world in 2011? Not good, it turns out. You can check out the World Bank's Food Price Watch for the details, though suffice to say that food prices have been on the rise.



The consequences of rising food prices are more than just empty bellies and barren tabletops, they manifest themselves on national scales as unease turns to unrest turns to upheaval. As this handy map from Wiki's page on the Arab Spring reminds us, the past nine months have seen tremendous political upheaval, particularly in the Middle East:



This coincides with the latest sharp rise in food prices on that chart. In late January of this year, the Tehran Times reported in "Arab dictatorships inundated by food price protests" that

Soaring food prices have forced people in many Arab states to allocate a larger portion of their income to the basic necessities of life pushing them deeper into poverty and sparking protests.

Widespread rallies last week in Algeria and Jordan demonstrated the public discontent about the economic situation that could have political repercussions. In the case of Tunisia, a 23-year-old dictatorship was overthrown. [...]

Food prices helped spark riots in Algeria earlier this month, forcing the government to cut import duties and taxes on sugar and cooking oil. Jordan cut fuel taxes and imposed price caps on sugar and rice to preempt unrest. Russia banned wheat exports last year after a poor harvest.

Prices for rice, world's most important and politically sensitive grain, have risen in the past six months, but remain well below 2008 highs.

A similar food price crisis in 2008 led to protests and riots in more than 30 countries.

Which brings me to an amazing article published in Foreign Policy earlier this year: "The New Geopolitics of Food."

It's absolutely worth reading the article in full but a few key points jumped out at me:

1. The prognosis is grim.

"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 U.S. Midwest. Such events were always disruptive, but thankfully infrequent. Unfortunately, today's price hikes are driven by trends that are both elevating demand and making it more difficult to increase production: among them, a rapidly expanding population, crop-withering temperature increases, and irrigation wells running dry."


2. Failures of our energy and transit policy are exacerbating the problem.

"At the same time, the United States, which once was able to act as a global buffer of sorts against poor harvests elsewhere, is now converting massive quantities of grain into fuel for cars, even as world grain consumption, which is already up to roughly 2.2 billion metric tons per year, is growing at an accelerating rate. A decade ago, the growth in consumption was 20 million tons per year. More recently it has risen by 40 million tons every year. But the rate at which the United States is converting grain into ethanol has grown even faster. In 2010, the United States harvested nearly 400 million tons of grain, of which 126 million tons went to ethanol fuel distilleries (up from 16 million tons in 2000). This massive capacity to convert grain into fuel means that the price of grain is now tied to the price of oil. So if oil goes to $150 per barrel or more, the price of grain will follow it upward as it becomes ever more profitable to convert grain into oil substitutes."

3. Fertile land is the new gold.

"Fearing they might not be able to buy needed grain from the market, some of the more affluent countries, led by Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and China, took the unusual step in 2008 of buying or leasing land in other countries on which to grow grain for themselves. Most of these land acquisitions are in Africa, where some governments lease cropland for less than $1 per acre per year. Among the principal destinations were Ethiopia and Sudan, countries where millions of people are being sustained with food from the U.N. World Food Program. That the governments of these two countries are willing to sell land to foreign interests when their own people are hungry is a sad commentary on their leadership."

4. The scenes in Soylent Green, particularly the riots around the food trucks, don't seem so far-fetched.

"Not only are these deals risky, but foreign investors producing food in a country full of hungry people face another political question of how to get the grain out. Will villagers permit trucks laden with grain headed for port cities to proceed when they themselves may be on the verge of starvation? The potential for political instability in countries where villagers have lost their land and their livelihoods is high. Conflicts could easily develop between investor and host countries."

At least, as a newly minted New Englander, I can take comfort in knowing we still have the vast bounty of the sea to sustain us.

World's oceans could be completely depleted of fish in 40 years: UN report
Tuesday, May 18, 2010

The world's oceans may be completely depleted of fish in 40 years if action is not taken to replenish stocks, the United Nations is warning in a new report.

In a preview of its upcoming report entitled the Green Economy, the United Nations Environment Programme states that "mismanagement, lack of enforcement and subsidies totaling over $27 billion annually have left close to 30 percent of fish stocks "collapsed."

"If the various estimates we have received ... come true, then we are in the situation where 40 years down the line we, effectively, are out of fish," Pavan Sukhdev, head of UNEP's Green Economy plan, told Agence France Presse on Monday.

Well, fuck.

Recently, arXiv Blog reported on a paper posted to the "Physics and Society" section of the arXiv e-print server (basically a free online physics journal) in "The Cause Of Riots And The Price of Food." A trio of complexity theorists examined the evidence and came to the--fairly self-evident--conclusion that "when the food price index rises above a certain threshold, the result is trouble around the world." But what's more interesting is that they gave a rough timeframe for when things might really start to get ugly.

But what's interesting about this analysis is that Lagi and co say that high food prices don't necessarily trigger riots themselves, they simply create the conditions in which social unrest can flourish. "These observations are consistent with a hypothesis that high global food prices are a precipitating condition for social unrest," say Lagi and co.

In other words, high food prices lead to a kind of tipping point when almost anything can trigger a riot, like a lighted match in a dry forest.

On 13 December last year, the group wrote to the US government pointing out that global food prices were about to cross the threshold they had identified. Four days later, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Tunisia in protest at government policies, an event that triggered a wave of social unrest that continues to spread throughout the middle east today. [...]

Today, the food price index remains above the threshold but the long term trend is still below. But it is rising. Lagi and co say that if the trend continues, the index is likely to cross the threshold in August 2013.

If their model has the predictive power they suggest, when that happens, the world will become a tinderbox waiting for a match.

So, if that analysis is correct, perhaps we have two years before the shit really hits the fan.

Corporate Green poster

Update: Paul Krugman shares my sense of humor (a day late): Soylent Green Is Corporations

Mitt Romney took a bit of heckling today on the campaign trail, leading to a memorable line:

DES MOINES, Iowa — Mitt Romney, who likes to promote his years in the private sector when out on the stump, offered a glimpse into his own business perspective at the Iowa State Fair on Thursday, telling a group of hecklers, “Corporations are people, my friend.” [...]

“We have to make sure that the promises we make in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are promises we can keep, and there are various ways of doing that,” Mr. Romney said. “One is we can raise taxes on people.”

“Corporations!” the protesters shouted, suggesting that Mr. Romney, as president, should raise taxes on large businesses. “Corporations!”

“Corporations are people, my friend,” Mr. Romney responded, as the hecklers shouted back, “No they’re not!”

Move over, Soylent Green, and eat your heart out, Heston.