Hitting the Fan: Climate Change, Food Shortages, and Political Unrest

I used to think I was cool
Running around on fossil fuel
Until I saw what I was doing
Was riding on the road to ruin.

–James Taylor

If Karl Marx taught the world worth anything of unquestionable value, it’s was the idea that social conflict is never just about ideas. Material needs and desires underpin our ideologies.That’s not to say that we don’t fight about ideas or that all social behavior can be reduced to the means of production. Here in the United States, I think we tended to treat Arab Spring as an democratic uprising against tyrannical and/or ethnic minority rule. How many of us knew that the years before those uprisings were preceded by food riots? Or that food scarcity is wrapped up in the environmental and economic effects of fossil fuel?

The Economist (hardly a Marxist rag) did:

From the start, food has played a bigger role in the upheavals than most people realise. Now, the Arab spring is making food problems worse.

They start with a peculiarity of the region: the Middle East and north Africa depend more on imported food than anywhere else. Most Arab countries buy half of what they eat from abroad and between 2007 and 2010, cereal imports to the region rose 13%, to 66m tonnes. Because they import so much, Arab countries suck in food inflation when world prices rise. In 2007-08, they spiked, with some staple crops doubling in price. In Egypt local food prices rose 37% in 2008-10.

Unsurprisingly, the spike triggered a wave of bread riots. Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan, Egypt and Morocco saw demonstrations about food in 2008. They all suffered political uprisings three years later.

The Arab spring was obviously about much more than food. But it played a role. “The food-price spike was the final nail in the coffin for regimes that were failing to deliver on their side of the social contract,” says Jane Harrigan of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies….

And neither food shortages nor civil unrest has yet to improve.

Instead the post-2008 crash era, including 2013 and early 2014, has seen a persistence and proliferation of civil unrest on a scale that has never been seen before in human history. This month alone has seen riots kick-off in Venezuela, Bosnia, Ukraine, Iceland, and Thailand.

This is not a coincidence. The riots are of course rooted in common, regressive economic forces playing out across every continent of the planet – but those forces themselves are symptomatic of a deeper, protracted process of global system failure as we transition from the old industrial era of dirty fossil fuels, towards something else.

Even before the Arab Spring erupted in Tunisia in December 2010, analysts at the New England Complex Systems Institute warned of the danger of civil unrest due to escalating food prices. If the Food & Agricultural Organisation (FAO) food price index rises above 210, they warned, it could trigger riots across large areas of the world.

The Middle East can’t grow all of its own food.Drought is a persistent problem and food is expensive.

most Arab states offset high world prices to keep food cheap in local terms. The cost of such policies is high. Food subsidies eat up some 4% of Egypt’s budget; Morocco boosted spending on fuel and food subsidies to $5 billion this year. In reaction to the riots, most Arab countries increased their subsidies. Kuwait, for example, is providing free staple food to everyone for 14 months.

These subsidies are having perverse effects. According to the Gallup World Poll, between a half and three-quarters of Arab populations say they are dissatisfied with their government’s poverty-reduction efforts. And cheap calories are bad for people’s health. Arab countries are seeing some of the biggest increases in obesity in the world. About 30% of Egyptian adults and 35% of Jordanians are obese. Most of all, subsidies are unaffordable, at least for oil importers.

So the need for reform is growing. Because subsidies are not targeted, they are inefficient. Egyptians use cheap bread as animal feed. Since the poorest 40% get less than 40% of the spending on cheap bread, the middle classes are capturing more than their fair share of benefits.

Writing in The Guardian, Nafeez Ahmed connects food shortages to our economic and environmental dependence on fossil fuels:

These local conditions are being exacerbated by global structural realities. Record high global food prices impinge on these local conditions and push them over the edge. But the food price hikes, in turn, are symptomatic of a range of overlapping problems. Global agriculture’s excessive dependence on fossil fuel inputs means food prices are invariably linked to oil price spikes. Naturally, biofuels and food commodity speculation pushes prices up even further – elite financiers alone benefit from this while working people from middle to lower classes bear the brunt.

Of course, the elephant in the room is climate change. According to Japanese media, a leaked draft of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) second major report warned that while demand for food will rise by 14%, global crop production will drop by 2% per decade due to current levels of global warming, and wreak $1.45 trillion of economic damage by the end of the century. The scenario is based on a projected rise of 2.5 degrees Celsius.

This is likely to be a very conservative estimate. Considering that the current trajectory of industrial agriculture is already seeing yield plateaus in major food basket regions, the interaction of environmental, energy, and economic crises suggests that business-as-usual won’t work.

Meanwhile, back on the homefront, 80% of our country is experiencing drought. In spite of recent rain, much of California is in a state of exceptional drought while the rest remains in severe drought. The federal government is providing money and grants to help the state. There’s no telling how long the drought will last, or ultimately, how it will affect America’s food security, but we’re already experiencing the effects of civil unrest in other countries. The effects of climate change, however, are starting to become clear. Warmer temperatures are only the beginning.