Country domino, the next candidates
The question which countries are next up for severe turmoil is currently becoming rather important. Given that oil and gas is getting more expensive without doubt and we are at the beginning of a worldwide food distribution crisis already, the countries where families are spending most on food already are getting to get hit the hardest. I only found statistics on how much of family income is spent on food for 2008 (links to newer data welcome!). Here is the list of those where the food expenditure are over 30% back then sorted by the percentage:.
It certainly has gone worse in the meantime for most of these (maybe with the exception of former Yugoslavia). India has been in the grip of an onion price crisis for several weeks now, Australias harvest is likely to be bad, Russia is beginning to sell wheat from its government reserves to stabilize prices that shot up due to the bad harvest from last summer, China is facing a drought, and on and on… Things are not getting better in the next months.
As Stratfor put it so precisely in a recent report on the limited extend of the actual grain reserves in Egypt:
As history has shown repeatedly, nothing is as dangerous to social stability in general or governments in particular as food shortages. People can and do riot about ideology or politics, but people must riot about food because, simply put, they can die if they do not.
It would be so much better if stock market speculation on foods would be banned …
@vera: Banning speculation sounds fine at the first glance (it raises the average price of food), but would have horrible consequences on the prices of products whose natural volatility is high. Without speculation, the wheat prices would have exploded after the fires in Russia. Speculants made huge profits by dumping their cheaply acquired wheat reserves on the market during the crisis, but this stopped the price rise. If speculation were banned, we’d need at least a mechanism to replace those features which are positive (i.e. flattening of the price curve, thus allowing farmers to plan what to sow next year and customers to buy what they need at a predictable price; and motivating somebody to maintain storage capacities to avoid disastrous results after a bad harvest).
Hast du eigentlich ein Stratfor Abonnement?
they should make hemp legal again and they wont be hungry
The Telegraph’s economy section has another interesting tidbit on the ongoing food crisis and its causes: The widespread death of bee colonies
apparently plays an important role in accelerating food shortage. Certain pesticides are suspected to be at the root of the problem. The Ministerium für Ländlichen Raum in Baden-Württemberg has some background info.
Guter Ansatz! Was kommt denn dann nach dieser Foodcrisis?
Demokratie=Globalisierung=US-Herrschaft…? Einfach weiter so? Neue Märkte und so?
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