DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The hunger wars in our
future By Michael T Klare
The Great Drought of 2012 has yet to come
to an end, but we already know that its
consequences will be severe. With more than
one-half of America's counties designated as
drought disaster areas, the 2012 harvest of corn,
soybeans, and other food staples is guaranteed to
fall far short of predictions. This, in turn, will
boost food prices domestically and abroad, causing
increased misery for farmers and low-income
Americans and far greater hardship for poor people
in countries that rely on imported US grains.
This, however, is just the beginning of
the likely consequences: if history is any guide,
rising food prices of this sort will also lead to
widespread social unrest
and violent conflict.
Food - affordable
food - is essential to human survival and
well-being. Take that away, and people become
anxious, desperate, and angry. In the United
States, food represents only about 13% of the
average household budget, a relatively small
share, so a boost in food prices in 2013 will
probably not prove overly taxing for most middle-
and upper-income families. It could, however,
produce considerable hardship for poor and
unemployed Americans with limited resources. "You
are talking about a real bite out of family
budgets," commented Ernie Gross, an agricultural
economist at Omaha's Creighton University. This
could add to the discontent already evident in
depressed and high-unemployment areas, perhaps
prompting an intensified backlash against
incumbent politicians and other forms of dissent
and unrest.
It is in the international
arena, however, that the Great Drought is likely
to have its most devastating effects. Because so
many nations depend on grain imports from the US
to supplement their own harvests, and because
intense drought and floods are damaging crops
elsewhere as well, food supplies are expected to
shrink and prices to rise across the planet.
"What happens to the US supply has immense
impact around the world," says Robert Thompson, a
food expert at the Chicago Council on Global
Affairs. As the crops most affected by the
drought, corn and soybeans, disappear from world
markets, he noted, the price of all grains,
including wheat, is likely to soar, causing
immense hardship to those who already have trouble
affording enough food to feed their families.
The Hunger Games, 2007-2011 What
happens next is, of course, impossible to predict,
but if the recent past is any guide, it could turn
ugly. In 2007-2008, when rice, corn, and wheat
experienced prices hikes of 100% or more, sharply
higher prices - especially for bread - sparked
"food riots" in more than two dozen countries,
including Bangladesh, Cameroon, Egypt, Haiti,
Indonesia, Senegal, and Yemen. In Haiti, the
rioting became so violent and public confidence in
the government's ability to address the problem
dropped so precipitously that the Haitian Senate
voted to oust the country's prime minister,
Jacques-Edouard Alexis. In other countries, angry
protestors clashed with army and police forces,
leaving scores dead.
Those price increases
of 2007-2008 were largely attributed to the
soaring cost of oil, which made food production
more expensive. (Oil's use is widespread in
farming operations, irrigation, food delivery, and
pesticide manufacture.) At the same time,
increasing amounts of cropland worldwide were
being diverted from food crops to the cultivation
of plants used in making biofuels.
The
next price spike in 2010-11 was, however, closely
associated with climate change. An intense drought
gripped much of eastern Russia during the summer
of 2010, reducing the wheat harvest in that
breadbasket region by one-fifth and prompting
Moscow to ban all wheat exports. Drought also hurt
China's grain harvest, while intense flooding
destroyed much of Australia's wheat crop. Together
with other extreme-weather-related effects, these
disasters sent wheat prices soaring by more than
50% and the price of most food staples by 32%.
Once again, a surge in food prices
resulted in widespread social unrest, this time
concentrated in North Africa and the Middle East.
The earliest protests arose over the cost of
staples in Algeria and then Tunisia, where - no
coincidence - the precipitating event was a young
food vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, setting himself on
fire to protest government harassment. Anger over
rising food and fuel prices combined with
long-simmering resentments about government
repression and corruption sparked what became
known as the Arab Spring. The rising cost of basic
staples, especially a loaf of bread, was also a
cause of unrest in Egypt, Jordan, and Sudan. Other
factors, notably anger at entrenched autocratic
regimes, may have proved more powerful in those
places, but as the author of Tropic of Chaos,
Christian Parenti, wrote, "The initial trouble was
traceable, at least in part, to the price of that
loaf of bread."
As for the current
drought, analysts are already warning of
instability in Africa, where corn is a major
staple, and of increased popular unrest in China,
where food prices are expected to rise at a time
of growing hardship for that country's vast pool
of low-income, migratory workers and poor
peasants. Higher food prices in the US and China
could also lead to reduced consumer spending on
other goods, further contributing to the slowdown
in the global economy and producing yet more
worldwide misery, with unpredictable social
consequences.
The Hunger Games,
2012-?? If this was just one bad harvest,
occurring in only one country, the world would
undoubtedly absorb the ensuing hardship and expect
to bounce back in the years to come.
Unfortunately, it's becoming evident that the
Great Drought of 2012 is not a one-off event in a
single heartland nation, but rather an inevitable
consequence of global warming which is only going
to intensify. As a result, we can expect not just
more bad years of extreme heat, but worse years,
hotter and more often, and not just in the United
States, but globally for the indefinite future.
Until recently, most scientists were
reluctant to blame particular storms or droughts
on global warming. Now, however, a growing number
of scientists believe that such links can be
demonstrated in certain cases. In one recent study
focused on extreme weather events in 2011, for
instance, climate specialists at the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Great
Britain's National Weather Service concluded that
human-induced climate change has made intense heat
waves of the kind experienced in Texas in 2011
more likely than ever before. Published in the
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society,
it reported that global warming had ensured that
the incidence of that Texas heat wave was 20 times
more likely than it would have been in 1960;
similarly, abnormally warm temperatures like those
experienced in Britain last November were said to
be 62 times as likely because of global warming.
It is still too early to apply the
methodology used by these scientists to calculate
the effect of global warming on the heat waves of
2012, which are proving to be far more severe, but
we can assume the level of correlation will be
high. And what can we expect in the future, as the
warming gains momentum?
When we think
about climate change (if we think about it at
all), we envision rising temperatures, prolonged
droughts, freakish storms, hellish wildfires, and
rising sea levels. Among other things, this will
result in damaged infrastructure and diminished
food supplies. These are, of course,
manifestations of warming in the physical world,
not the social world we all inhabit and rely on
for so many aspects of our daily well-being and
survival. The purely physical effects of climate
change will, no doubt, prove catastrophic. But the
social effects including, somewhere down the line,
food riots, mass starvation, state collapse, mass
migrations, and conflicts of every sort, up to and
including full-scale war, could prove even more
disruptive and deadly.
In her immensely
successful young-adult novel The Hunger
Games (and the movie that followed), Suzanne
Collins riveted millions with a portrait of a
dystopian, resource-scarce, post-apocalyptic
future where once-rebellious "districts" in an
impoverished North America must supply two
teenagers each year for a series of televised
gladiatorial games that end in death for all but
one of the youthful contestants.
These
"hunger games" are intended as recompense for the
damage inflicted on the victorious capital of
Panem by the rebellious districts during an
insurrection. Without specifically mentioning
global warming, Collins makes it clear that
climate change was significantly responsible for
the hunger that shadows the North American
continent in this future era. Hence, as the
gladiatorial contestants are about to be selected,
the mayor of District 12's principal city
describes "the disasters, the droughts, the
storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that
swallowed up so much of the land [and] the brutal
war for what little sustenance remained."
In this, Collins was prescient, even if
her specific vision of the violence on which such
a world might be organized is fantasy. While we
may never see her version of those hunger games,
do not doubt that some version of them will come
into existence - that, in fact, hunger wars of
many sorts will fill our future. These could
include any combination or permutation of the
deadly riots that led to the 2008 collapse of
Haiti's government, the pitched battles between
massed protesters and security forces that
engulfed parts of Cairo as the Arab Spring
developed, the ethnic struggles over disputed
croplands and water sources that have made Darfur
a recurring headline of horror in our world, or
the inequitable distribution of agricultural land
that continues to fuel the insurgency of the
Maoist-inspired Naxalites of India.
Combine such conflicts with another
likelihood: that persistent drought and hunger
will force millions of people to abandon their
traditional lands and flee to the squalor of
shantytowns and expanding slums surrounding large
cities, sparking hostility from those already
living there. One such eruption, with grisly
results, occurred in Johannesburg's shantytowns in
2008 when desperately poor and hungry migrants
from Malawi and Zimbabwe were set upon, beaten,
and in some cases burned to death by poor South
Africans. One terrified Zimbabwean, cowering in a
police station from the raging mobs, said she fled
her country because "there is no work and no
food". And count on something else: millions more
in the coming decades, pressed by disasters
ranging from drought and flood to rising sea
levels, will try to migrate to other countries,
provoking even greater hostility. And that hardly
begins to exhaust the possibilities that lie in
our hunger-games future.
At this point,
the focus is understandably on the immediate
consequences of the still ongoing Great Drought:
dying crops, shrunken harvests, and rising food
prices. But keep an eye out for the social and
political effects that undoubtedly won't begin to
show up here or globally until later this year or
2013. Better than any academic study, these will
offer us a hint of what we can expect in the
coming decades from a hunger-games world of rising
temperatures, persistent droughts, recurring food
shortages, and billions of famished, desperate
people.
Michael T Klare is a
professor of peace and world security studies at
Hampshire College, a TomDispatch regular, and the
author most recently of The Race for What's
Left: The Global Scramble for the World's Last
Resources (Metropolitan Books).
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