Food Riots

World Bank warns of food riots as rising food prices push world populations toward revolt

(NaturalNews) A new report issued by the World Bank warns that food prices are skyrocketing globally, with wheat up 18 percent and corn up 12 percent this quarter. Ukraine, one of the largest wheat exporters in the world, has suffered a 73 percent increase in domestic wheat costs. Argentina has seen wheat prices skyrocket 70 percent.

According to the World Bank, these price increases have been caused primarily by three factors: 1) Sharply higher demand for food in China, 2) U.S. drought conditions that hammered wheat production, and 3) unrest in Ukraine due to the near state of war with Russia.

Rising food prices lead to food riots

According to the World Bank, rising food prices have caused 51 food riots in 37 countries since 2007. These include Tunisia, South Africa, Cameroon and India, among other nations.

"Food price shocks can both spark and exacerbate conflict and political instability," warns the report.

A World Bank blog entry by Senior Economist Jose Cuesta entitled "No Food, No Peace" warns that "It is quite likely that we will experience more food riots in the foreseeable future... food price shocks have repeatedly led to spontaneous -- typically urban -- sociopolitical instability."

Hunger leads to revolution

What the World Bank is leading to (but not quite saying) is that hunger leads to revolution. When the People are starving in the streets, there is political unrest that can easily turn violent. Because this is a fundamental human reaction, it is just as true in the United States, UK and other first-world nations as it is in Cameroon or India.

American investigative journalist Alfred Henry Lewis (1855-1914) famously said, "There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy." He went on to explain, "It may be taken as axiomatic that a starving man is never a good citizen."

What he means is that hunger dispels the illusions of a polite society and unleashes the desperate animal-like nature that lurks inside all human beings. A starving man trying to feed his starving children will at some point abandon all law and order, doing anything necessary to keep himself and his children alive, including engaging in robbery, assault and murder.

Stated another way, the only reason most people obey laws and agree to live in a socially polite manner is because their bellies are full. Take away the food and all illusions of social friendliness vanish in about nine meals (three days). No local police force can hope to control the actions of the starving masses, regardless of how obedient the population once was when food was abundant.

The coming food collapse is now inevitable

Many are now warning about the coming collapse in the food supply. These warnings include all the following factors:

EBT CARDS are the federal government's "food stamp" system that distributes money to over 47 million Americans who use that money on debit cards to buy food. The EBT system depends entirely on the financial solvency of the federal government, an empire steeped in over $17 trillion in debt and constantly on the verge of a financial wipeout. When the day comes that the feds stop funding the EBT cards, food riots are imminent. EBT cardholders have already ransacked a Wal-Mart store, even in good times! (Once the EBT entitlements are cut off, EBT card holders will simply ransack the same stores they used to visit as customers. Once those stores run out of food, U.S. cities will devolve into all-out street warfare.)

hydrologic cycle scientists are warning that much of the food production taking place in the world today -- across the USA, India, China, etc. -- depends entirely on fossil water extraction from underground aquifers. Those aquifers are being rapidly depleted, some dropping more than a foot each year. Once this fossil water is used up, it's gone for hundreds or thousands of years. Entire breadbasket regions of the world (such as the U.S. Midwest) will be turned into agricultural deserts. Already, much of Texas and Oklahoma is returning to Dust Bowl conditions.

Environmentalists warn that climate change will cause radical weather patterns (droughts, floods, freezes) that devastate the food supply. It is undeniable that radical weather has already caused unprecedented destruction of U.S. food production over the last 18 months. (The underlying causes of such weather patterns, however, remain hotly debated.)

Genetically modified crops are genetically vulnerable to disease because they are mono-culture crops with little genetic diversity. Nearly all corn grown in the USA, for example, is genetically modified corn with a near-identical genetic makeup. The situation is obviously ripe for precisely the kind of disease wipeout we're already witnessing with global banana crops.

Economists are warning that the global money supply is on the verge of collapse. Once it collapses, banking would go down with it, destroying the infrastructure that people use to buy food. If grocery stores can't conduct financial transactions, they can't buy inventory to retail to the public, for starters

Permaculture advocates are warning that the global seed supply has been deliberately collapsed by biotech companies which routinely buy up small seed companies and shut them down. The intention is to create seed monopolies and eliminate competing alternatives to patented, corporate-controlled seeds. The answer to all this, by the way, is found in the wisdom of people like Geoff Lawton who teaches decentralized, abundant food production based on permaculture design science. (Really, Geoff's wisdom can save our world if embraced as a replacement for corporate agriculture...)

Temporary illusions of cheap food will soon be shattered

In other words, there are economic, hydrologic and genetic reasons why today's abundant food supply will come to an abrupt end. The cheap, easy food you buy at the grocery store right now is a temporary illusion of cheap food based on unsustainable agricultural practices that use up fossil water, destroy topsoil and poison the environment.

Even the U.S. government's subsidizing of food through its runaway food stamp program is a temporary artifact of a nation headed for an inevitable debt collapse. It is therefore a mathematical and physical certainty that this illusion of cheap, plentiful food will soon be shattered. And in its wake, we will be left with a starving, desperate population with nothing to lose by marching in the streets or staging a violent revolt.

America has abandoned food security in favor of corporate monopolies

Everywhere that this happens will see cities turned into death traps. Because of the centralized corporate farming model that now dominates first-world economies, food production (and even farm land) is controlled by very small number of corporate operations. This is the opposite of food security.

A nation practicing food security would encourage home gardens and support decentralized food production that includes urban food production. Interestingly, nations like Cuba and Russia have encouraged precisely these practices, which is why they are more resistant to a food supply collapse.

In the United States, however, home gardeners have been threatened with arrest. People who produce real food are often raided at gunpoint by government authorities. Farmers who try to produce clean, non-GMO crops are sued by companies like Monsanto whose seeds pollute their farm land.

Government and corporate entities have colluded in the United States to monopolize food production, thereby centralizing it in a way that compromises food security. The day of Americans being told to "plant Victory Gardens" during World War II are long gone. Today, we're told to obediently line up and eat genetically modified soybeans or drink hormone-contaminated cow's milk. Government now demands our food obedience and actively works against individuals who try to produce their own food at the local level.

Why the food supply is America's tactical vulnerability

This makes America wildly vulnerable to disruptions in the food supply. While many nations can manage to get by thanks to home gardens and decentralize food production, the United States of America has allowed government and corporations to structure the national food supply system into a precarious, non-fault-tolerant configuration that's practically begging for collapse.

Just one disruption in the system -- a failed power grid, failed fuel refineries or a failed financial transaction infrastructure -- would collapse food availability nationwide, sending the population into a near-immediate state of desperate starvation. Martial Law would no doubt quickly follow, after which Americans would be ordered to starve to death at the hands of FEMA instead of starving to death on their own.

Read more here:

(NaturalNews)