The Food Crises and Political Instability in North Africa and the Middle East
By Marco Lagi, K. Bertrand, Y. Bar-Yam. 2011
322 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Social unrest may reflect a variety of factors such as poverty, unemployment, and social injustice. Despite the many possible contributing factors, the timing of violent protests in North Africa and the Middle East in 2011 as well as earlier riots in 2008 coincides with large peaks in global food prices. We identify a specific food price threshold above which protests become likely. These observations suggest that protests may reflect not only long-standing political failings of governments, but also the sudden desperate straits of vulnerable populations. If food prices remain high, there is likely to be persistent and increasing global social disruption. Underlying the food price peaks we also find an ongoing trend of increasing prices. We extrapolate these trends and identify a crossing point to the domain of high impacts, even without price peaks, in 2012-2013. This implies that avoiding global food crises and associated social unrest requires rapid and concerted action.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Health Professions, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d11206ceeec497bb8e338d1662c6d02614dbc098
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In Economics and Econometrics
Citations in the corpus
- Can sub-Saharan Africa feed itself? (2016, background): “Increased price volatility of major food crops (3, 4) and an abrupt surge in land area devoted to crop production since approximately 2002 (5) reflect the powerful forces underpinning this challenge.”
- Adaptation and development pathways for different types of farmers (2019, background): “Dozens of food riots occurred between 2008 and 2011 when food prices reached levels (in real terms) that had not been seen since the 1970s (FAO, 2017; Lagi et al., 2011).”
- Feeding unrest (2014, background): “Much like Lagi, Bertrand & Bar-Yam (2011), however, his causal explanation is based on the flawed assumption that changes in international commodity prices are directly reflected in domestic prices (Bellemare, 2012).”
- The interconnected challenges for food security from a food regimes perspective: Energy, climate and malconsumption (2013, unknown): “Finally, work conducted at the New England Complex Systems Institute not only quantitatively models the dynamic relationship of food prices with financial speculation and ethanol conversion, but traces the links between food price volatility and political instability in North Africa and the Middle E”