Extreme Weather, High Food Prices and Rapidly Spreading Riots Mark the Start of 2011

Copyright (c) 2011 Alison Withers

Unprecedented flood levels in Brazil, in Australia, in Sri Lanka, the Philippines and now in S Africa threaten to add to the problem of food price inflation.

Although scientists say the most recent wave of floods in the Pacific region is due to the natural phenomenon of La Nina in the South Pacific and in Brazil on localized conditions and therefore cannot be seen as linked to climate change, their extreme severity may well cause the non scientists among us to wonder.

It is being predicted that food prices will rise in Australia by 30% as a result of the floods and 50% of the stricken area's crops had been affected, while 20% had been destroyed altogether. In Sri Lanka the flooding has disrupted farming and destroyed paddy fields.

Simultaneously Argentina, one of the world's main providers of soybeans, has been hit by a drought which is predicted to reduce its soybean crop by 13% as well as having ongoing effects on small farmers who have not had enough rain to plant their second soybean crops.

At the same time with the New Year barely two weeks old a rash of demonstrations has broken out across the Maghreb region of North Africa (Algeria, Tunisia, Mauritania, Libya) as well as in Jordan and most recently a "copycat" demonstrator setting himself on fire in protest in Egypt.

These protests may have complex causes, but the final straw seems to have been the twin issues of high unemployment and rising food prices that triggered popular action and already they have toppled the government in Tunisia.

The forces that have been building for more than a decade as the developed world has continued to over-consume and live unsustainably off credit have culminated in the desperate economic conditions that have been sparking the food riots. It is the last two years, following the onset of the global economic crisis and the bursting of the credit bubble in the USA, Europe and the UK, however, that has pushed many disadvantaged and desperate people to the point of action.

The "least developed countries" spent 9 billion dollars on food imports in 2002. By 2008, that number had risen to 23 billion dollars and with the FAO reporting that by December 2010 food prices had outstripped their last peak in 2008, perhaps it is no surprise that patience is running out.

Research by the World Institute for Development's has calculated that the bottom half of the world population owns approximately 1 percent of all global wealth.

On January 12 the US-based Worldwatch Institute published its annual State of the World report that suggested that the key to alleviating world hunger, poverty and combating climate change may lie in moving away from industrial scale agriculture towards fresh, small-scale approaches to agriculture to encourage self-sufficiency and waste reduction, in both wealthier and poorer nations.

Sustainable, smaller-scale farming is not a new idea, but it cannot happen unless the small farmers responsible for the majority of global food production, are given affordable tools, training and infrastructure.

This may mean innovative experiments, like the development of drought resistant seeds, or India's recently announced project to find out whether cash crops can be grown in salty, coastal Tamil Nadu.

Equally, it means making the already-developed low-chem agricultural products such as biopesticides, biofungicides and yield enhancers from the biopesticides developers cheaper, bringing them to market faster and distributing them more widely, backed up by the training to small farmers in how to use. Otherwise, unless global harvests are not significantly better than most analysts are currently projecting, expect to see even more food riots in 2011.

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