Take the food riots now spreading across the planet because the prices of staples are soaring, while stocks of basics are falling. In the last year, wheat (think flour) has risen by 130%, rice by 74%, soya by 87%, and corn by 31%, while there are now only eight to 12 weeks of cereal stocks left globally. Governments across the planetary map are shuddering.
Global food prices have risen 80% over the past three years, and the primary reason may be the success of capitalism in China and India over the past two decades: Their industrialization has spurred demand for energy beyond the capacity of supply, which has pushed oil prices to levels five times what they were in the mid 1990s. That, in turn, has raised pressure on food prices by making agricultural inputs more expensive, and by prompting the substitution of biofuel crops for edible ones on scarce farmland. And, of course, capitalism has indeed raised the living standards of hundreds of millions of people in those countries — they’re eating more, and better, particularly more meat.
Moreover, when the source of that hunger is not the absence of food per se, but the invisible barrier of social inequalities that stand between poor people and the food supplies their poverty denies them, things can turn pretty nasty, pretty quickly. And that’s precisely what we’re seeing right now.
Hunger, in itself, is not sufficient to create a political crisis that threatens the very survival of the established order. But in many instances, it has been a necessary component of the despair that forces that has forced ordinary people to take extraordinary risks, confronting those armed to defend the existing order — and, of course, revolutions succeed precisely in that moment when the soldiers and policemen paid to defend the existing order look into the eyes of the “enemy” confronting them, on the streets, and they see themselves, their families and neighbors, and the state’s power to enforce its rule evaporates. As the great Bertolt Brecht once noted, “General, your tank is a powerful vehicle it smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men. But it has one defect: it needs a driver.”
Turns out the Malthusians, and even — gasp! — their Marxist progeny, were not entirely wrong, after all: Spread capitalism to every corner of the globe (a planet already blighted by a century of industrialism with its attendant sometimes catastrophic climate) and the rich do, indeed, get richer, while the poor do get poorer, although not necessarily more numerous.
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/2008/04/food_riots.html
SOURCE: http://tonykaron.com/2008/04/09/a-revolutionary-moment-in-egypt/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/13/food.climatechange
SOURCE: http://tomdispatch.com/
