Rising food prices, climate change and global ‘unrest’

I don’t mean to put a damper on the everyone’s summer holidays, but the current heatwaves in the U.S. and Europe has me thinking back to numerous warnings issued during last summer’s major drought and “record-breaking heatwave” in the U.S.

Analysts at Rabobank, a Netherlands-based bank specialising in food and agri-business financing, were crunching the numbers and predicted at the time that food prices, specifically meat prices, would soar in 2013 as a result of the U.S. drought.

Back in 2011, the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), a research body of academics from Harvard and MIT, using data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) Food Price Index, published a paper that correlated “outbreaks of unrest” in 2008 and 2011 with increases in food prices. They claimed to have identified the precise threshold for global food prices that leads to worldwide unrest: 210 points…

“high global food prices are a precipitating condition for social unrest. More specifically, food riots occur above a threshold of the FAO price index of 210.”

NESCI

Yaneer Bar-Yam, president of NECSI and one of the paper’s authors, said:

“When people are unable to feed themselves and their families, widespread social disruption occurs. We are on the verge of another crisis, the third in five years, and likely to be the worst yet, capable of causing new food riots and turmoil on a par with the Arab Spring.”

The aggregated FAO Food Price Index averaged 211.3 points in June this year, but more telling indicators might be their June 2013 Cereal Price Index, which averaged 236.5 points, and their Sugar Price Index, which averaged 242.6 points. Dairy prices are also riding above this 210 threshold, so when we consider that most people’s diets are substantially based on sugar, cereals and dairy, followed by meats from cattle raised on grains, it seems pretty clear that we’re very much in the danger zone.

In fact, the NESCI paper, ‘The Food Crises and Political Instability in North Africa and the Middle East’, went further and forecast the highest risk of global unrest for August 2013.

“When you have food prices that peak, you have all these riots. But look under the peaks, at the background trend. That’s increasing quite rapidly, too,” said Yaneer Bar-Yam. “In one to two years [from 2011], the background trend runs into the place where all hell breaks loose.”

The Food Crises and Political Instability report doesn’t simply compile the correlation between food prices and political uprisings, but also projects a certain global threshold when food price trends might rise significantly enough to spark global unrest. According to the NECSI, the world will reach its food price threshold in August 2013.

Compounded by speculators in the commodities markets “making a killing” on the food crisis, prices for staples like corn and wheat rose nearly 50% on international markets last summer. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) predicts that rising global food demand will “push up prices 10 to 40 percent over the coming decade” [that is, between 10 and 40 percent higher than their current highs].

Meanwhile the UN has warned that world grain reserves are so dangerously low that “severe weather in the U.S. or other food-exporting countries could trigger a major hunger crisis in 2013.”

‘Green guru’ Lester Brown, president of D.C.-based think-tank, the Earth Policy Institute, says the climate is “no longer reliable” and that demands for food are growing so fast that a breakdown is inevitable:

“Food shortages undermined earlier civilisations. We are on the same path. Each country is now fending for itself. The world is living one year to the next… Climate is in a state of flux; there is no normal any more. We are beginning a new chapter.”

Here’s what Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior FAO economist, had to say about the global food crisis last year:

“We’ve not been producing as much as we are consuming. That is why stocks are being run down. Supplies are now very tight across the world and reserves are at a very low level, leaving no room for unexpected events next year.“

 

Yes, that means there’s no room for unexpected events this year (2013).

China, normally the world’s second largest surplus exporter of wheat, just this week announced that it will be importing wheat from the U.S. this year, following major crop failures resulting from the northern hemisphere’s record-breaking cold, wet spring.

 

But the U.S. isn’t faring any better, with the 2012 drought extending into this year and condemning the growing season before it even started. Far from producing “no unexpected events”, 2013 is producing even wilder weather extremes than ever before.

Buckle up: we’re in for a rocky ride…

Manufacturing civil war in Egypt: ‘Mystery’ snipers massacre Morsi supporters

A week after the Egyptian Army deposed President Mohamed Morsi, supporters of the ousted leader were massacred yesterday during a sit-in protest at an “elite army base” in Cairo. So far over 50 have been reported dead, with hundreds injured. The Muslim Brotherhood is blaming the Egyptian army and police, but a military spokesman has said a “terrorist group” was responsible.

“We have people hit in the head, we have bullets that exploded as they entered the body, cluttering organs and body parts” said Gehad Haddad, a spokesman for Muslim Brotherhood.

Adamant that the role of police and army is to “safeguard the people’s revolution”, no matter their particular political affiliation, military spokesman Ahmed Ali said security forces acted “in self-defence against armed men attacking them from various locations, including rooftops.”

No one disputes that there were clashes between Morsi supporters – at least some of whom also appeared to be armed and intent on violence – and the security forces sent in to remove them, but it’s unclear who the gunmen were:

Witnesses, including Brotherhood supporters at the scene, said the army fired only tear gas and warning shots and that “thugs” in civilian clothes had carried out the deadly shooting.

This bloodbath comes on the heels of arguably the largest mass demonstrations in modern history, and is almost certainly going to spiral out of control and plunge Egypt into chaos.

This is not the first time ‘mystery gunmen’ have begun shooting people in the head since the uprising began in 2011. In March 2013, a Morsi government inquiry into the deaths of nearly 900 protesters in Egypt at the end of Mubarak’s reign concluded that, “police were behind nearly all the killings and used snipers on rooftops overlooking Cairo’s Tahrir Square to shoot into the huge crowds.”

Police officials told the commission that snipers’ equipment of the kind used during the uprising could only be found with members of an elite counterterrorism unit that worked under Mubarak’s pervasive state security agency and took orders directly from the interior minister.

Most the victims were shot in the head or chest, suggesting the use of snipers, and bystanders were also killed or wounded as they watched the clashes from their homes, the report said.

So, Mubarak ordered teams of snipers to shoot protesters in the head in order to justify widespread repression of the uprising in a last-ditch effort to maintain power.

Case closed?

Not quite. Sniper attacks continued during Morsi’s brief reign, with more ‘mystery’ snipers picking people off in Port Said as recently as January this year.

Since his removal from power and subsequent death in 2012, Mubarak can’t of course be blamed for the recent coordinated efforts to generate chaos.

The gunmen’s identities may forever remain unknown, but the modus operandi is the same as ever. We saw it in Tunisia in 2011; we saw it Iran in 2009; we saw it in Venezuela in 2002; we see it in Syria to this day. Protesters are always shot randomly – usually in the head – to maximise mass panic and stimulate in-fighting.

The people behind this understand that ‘régime change’ – perhaps more accurately termed ‘régime management’ in Egypt’s case – depends on instability. The media always report its effects in general terms, lamenting the ‘tragic escalation of violence’, but never homes in on the clear and deliberate efforts of parties unknown to instigate bloody mayhem.

Thanks to the CIA concept of ‘plausible deniability’, Obama can sit back, enjoy a round of golf, and say with a straight face that the U.S. is “not getting involved by backing any particular Egyptian party or group.”

But what does that mean coming from the leader of a country that has effectively ruled Egypt for decades, at arm’s length, through massive military ‘aid’?

It means that, like the Lavon Affair…

The Lavon Affair refers to a failed Israeli covert operation, code named Operation Susannah, conducted in Egypt in the Summer of 1954. As part of the false flag operation, a group of Egyptian Jews were recruited by Israeli military intelligence for plans to plant bombs inside Egyptian, American and British-owned civilian targets, cinema, library and American educational center. The attacks were to be blamed on the Muslim Brotherhood, Egyptian Communists, “unspecified malcontents” or “local nationalists” with the aim of creating a climate of sufficient violence and instability to induce the British government to retain its occupying troops in Egypt’s Suez Canal zone.

…these sniper massacres serve one goal: to create a “climate of sufficient violence and instability” that enables the ruling elite in Egypt and their brethren in the U.S. and Israel to subvert, at all costs, the dreams held by ordinary Egyptians of realising self-government by, for and of the people.

Adam Kokesh calls for ‘New American Revolution’

This, if nothing else, will be interesting to watch.

I posted a few weeks back about this armed march on Washington, D.C. that was planned by ‘good soldier’ and U.S. Iraq War vet, Adam Kokesh:

Internet radio host and former RT presenter Adam Kokesh is hoping to get 1,000 people to march on Washington, D.C. this coming July 4 – armed with loaded rifles. Their plan is to gather on the Virginia side of the Potomac, then march across the bridge with loaded rifles slung over their shoulders.

Some developments since then:

Adam Kokesh is cancelling his planned July 4 armed march on Washington, D.C., and instead calling for a march on all 50 state capitols with the goal of overthrowing the federal government.

Kokesh, a former host for Russian state-sponsored RT television who now hosts an internet radio show, told conspiracy theorist radio host Pete Santilli that it was time to “escalate our tactics” before cancelling the Washington march and urging supporters to march on their state capitol instead.

In a statement that paraphrases V’s ‘chat with the nation’ in the movie V for Vendetta, Kokesh called for “A new American revolution”, saying that it is:

“…long overdue. This revolution has been brewing in the hearts and minds of the people for many years, but this Independence Day, it shall take a new form as the American Revolutionary Army will march on each state capital to demand that the governors of these 50 states immediately initiate the process of an orderly dissolution of the federal government through secession and reclamation of federally held property. Should one whole year from this July 4th pass while the crimes of this government are allowed to continue, we may have passed the point at which non-violent revolution becomes impossible… we will see you on the front lines of freedom on July 4th, 2013 for this, The Final American Revolution.“

If you’ve listened to our SOTT Talk Radio show on 9/11, you’ll remember Pete Santilli as Dr. Judy Wood’s ‘handler’, who called in right as the show began in an apparent attempt to stir up shit.

On May 18th, Kokesh was arrested at a ‘legalize pot rally’ in Philadelphia, before being released after his felony charges were reduced to citations.

I guess there’s nothing like a bit of controversy to give your ‘movement’ some legs.

There has been a fairly transparent effort, especially since 9/11, to agitate those few Americans who see their government’s crimes into responding with violence. I’m all for seeing the toxic concentration of power in D.C. broken up, but I also know that the Feds will be just licking their chops at the prospect of shooting down any attempted armed takeover of State capitols.