Russian Wheat Export Ban = Riots in Mozambique?

The flapping of a single butterfly's wing today produces a tiny change…
…so, in a month's time,
a tornado that would have devastated the Indonesian coast doesn't happen,
or maybe one that wasn't going to happen does.

Ian Stewart
The Mathematics of Chaos

"U.N. Raises Concerns as Global Food Prices Jump
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

With memories still fresh of food riots set off by spiking prices just two years ago, agricultural experts on Friday cast a wary eye on the steep rise in the cost of wheat prompted by a Russian export ban and the questions looming over harvests in other parts of the world because of drought or flooding.

Food prices rose 5 percent globally during August, according to the United Nations, spurred mostly by the higher cost of wheat, and the first signs of unrest erupted as 10 people died in Mozambique during clashes ignited partly by a 30 percent leap in the cost of bread.

If too many Gazelles relative to water and grass lead to fewer Gazelles,
do fewer Gazelles  =  fewer Cheetahs?

...It is an issue not limited to Russia alone. Harvest forecasts in Germany and Canada are clouded by wet weather and flooding, while crops in Argentina will suffer from drought, as could Australia’s, according to agricultural experts. The bump in prices because of the uncertainty about future supplies means the poor in some areas of the world will face higher bread prices in the coming months.

If water was money and grass was credit
and Cheetahs and Gazelles were people,
who would be who?

Food prices are still some 30 percent below the 2008 levels, Mr. Abbassian said, when a tripling in the price of rice among other staples led to food riots in about a dozen countries and helped topple at least one government.

Did shortages of arable land and food
coincide with many Rwandan Hutus eliminating many Tutsis?

...In June, Russia was predicting a loss of just a few million metric tons due to hot weather, but by August it announced it would lose about one-fifth of its crop. Wheat prices more than doubled in that period.

...In early August, Russia announced an export ban that it would review at the end of the year, but Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin announced Thursday that the ban on grain exports would extend into 2011. The price of wheat jumped again, and that has had a spillover effect into other grains like corn and soybeans. The forecast for the global rice harvest has also dropped, although it is still expected to be higher than in 2009 and should be a record...

Only seven meals separate civilization from potential anarchy.

Josette Sheeran
UN World Food Program

 

...After two days of rioting set off by price increases for bread and utilities like electricity and water, the streets in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, were largely calm on Friday.

...Price increases have been much sharper in Mozambique than in most of the world because the government kept prices artificially low before elections last year...

What could happen if there’s enough food but some can’t afford it,
or governments can’t provide it?

As with any commodity, questions of wheat shortages spur speculation and hoarding, and experts suggest both are at play...

 

But the world also has to come to grips with changing weather patterns due to climate change, argued Prof. Per Pinstrup-Anderson, an expert in international agriculture at Cornell University.

You're captives of a civilizational system
that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world
 in order to live.

Daniel Quinn
Postulated correlations between  population growth
and natural resource consumption

“We are going to have much bigger fluctuations in weather and therefore the food supply than we had in the past, so we are going to have to learn how to cope with fluctuating food prices,” Professor Pinstrup-Anderson said."

New York Times

How many need and/or want how much of what,
where is half way, who’s got what’s left, who gets cut off when,
who will compete with who for what’s left,
and how is who most likely to win?