United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization's world food price index from 1990-2012 (accessed 13 March 2012). Observe the coincidence of real and nominal food price peaks with civil unrest.
I used to be fascinated with economics until I started learning about banking and reserve ratios, and that’s when I started to fall asleep in my high school classes. But if I could teach economics my way, I would have started off drawing a production possibilities curve (one of the first graphs we learned) using wheat on the horizontal axis and guns on the vertical axis. And instead of leading my students down an a priori path that preaches free market capitalism, I’d introduce them to worlds where free market capitalism has failed and life has indeed become a matter of choosing between feeding your children or taking up arms.
This is the dire economic reality for the growing number of people living on the economic margins, and I’m concerned about what lurks around the corner of our future. If I’m lucky enough to one day get into a top-notch graduate economics program, I would dedicate all my time and energy looking into relationships between access to healthy food and basic resources and the incidence of civil unrest. There is a more general theory that guides this work however: income inequality has the potential to exacerbate pre-existing economic conditions. This chart that I pulled from the UN FAO makes my point on a very cursory level.
Food and water, to me, are sacred. And so it hurts me on a very profound level knowing there are people in this world being deprived of such basic sacred rights due to S/E/P machinations. Hopefully, if my prayers are answered, I’ll one day have a platform to speak up on these issues in order to raise greater awareness.
I don’t believe that food is scarce, but rather the many factors preventing equality in food distribution: farms and other food suppliers establishing business relationships with only a limited amount of corporate owned groceries and markets; oil politics affecting gas prices, which in turn affect food prices due to the strain of transportation between the suppliers and markets; companies creating synthetic versions of natural crops in native regions (it’s like the food version of manufacturers creating fake Prada and selling it as their own brand); natural forces such as freak streaks of drought; farmers losing land for real estate development; etc.
But overall, I agree with this post and co-sign it with my blood.
That’s the paradox. There’s more food than ever, yet more hunger than ever. But food in a market economy goes to the highest bidder. So you can see how income inequality plays a role in influencing market prices for food commodities. A Wall Street banker will value a bushel of wheat differently from a Somali mother trying to feed her starving children.