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Complex Systems Theorists Predict We're About One Year From Global Food Riots
pigrabbitbear writes with conjecture on what triggers global unrest. Quoting the article: "In a 2011 paper, researchers at the Complex Systems Institute unveiled a model that accurately explained why the waves of unrest that swept the world in 2008 and 2011 crashed when they did. The number one determinant was soaring food prices. Their model identified a precise threshold for global food prices that, if breached, would lead to worldwide unrest."
Means we can buy their cities for half price. Engage the diplomat unis!
No man is more than three square meals away from revolution.
Malthus? Is that you?
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
"Experts" have been incorrectly predicting that vast swaths of humanity would startve to death at least since Malthus. How can claims like this still be taken seriously?
Perhaps I could buy the claim that "food riots will happen, despit no lack of food"; after all, we do as a species love to protest. We produce enough food to feed everyone as the populaiton grows while less land is needed for farming every decade. The WHO warns about similar numbers of people facing obesity problems as they do starvation problems. Yes, there will always be governments that withhold food as a weapon against their own citizens, but beyond that any claim of a food shortage just seems silly.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
In a 2011 paper ... explained why ... in 2008 and 2011
It's easy to make a model that correctly accounts for the past. Before I read the article, I was hoping that it was a model they created earlier, and just released last year. It wasn't. From the article:
We extrapolate these trends and identify a crossing point ... in 2012-2013
That the contemporary "Zombie" as portrayed in movies, at the receiving end of a chainsaw or shotgun, looks and acts very much like a hungry person would?
Sometimes I wonder if that's just a co-incidence or by design... After all, there's not much difference between a starving person calling out "Brains" and "Grains" is there?
And when I do wonder that, I really, really hope it's by co-incidence.
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
While there have been several suggested origins of the food price increases, we find the dominant ones to be investor speculation and ethanol production.
I'm more inclined to believe the latter, because there was never a shortage of grain - just high prices. The US wasted millions of tons of grain making ethanol in a misguided attempt to not burn fossil fuel.
Yeah, because just what the world needs is a ton of old people supported by only a few young people?
Better yet, let's just off ourselves to start getting things back in balance; you first.
The sad, self-indulgent wankers over at CNN like to claim that the so-called 'Arab Spring', came about because of Twitter, Facebook and smartphones.
The reality, according to people in the know, is that the Angry Arab Jamboree of 2011/2012 was caused by severe financial pressure caused by food poverty on already badly-run middle-eastern Muslim countries. The people who run these countries like to keep their people illiterate, corrupt, religious and poor so they can maintain control; unfortunately for them, it gives them VERY little margin for error when a few harvests fail, especially when even in good times, 70% of the country is quite literally on the breadline.
I have little sympathy for anybody here. It's self inflicted -- people dumb enough to wait until they're starving -- and spending 70% of their incomes on bread -- before they hold their governments accountable probably deserve the kicking they're getting.
There's a movement in the industrialized world. Fewer young people are choosing to have children period. I'm not sure if this trend would ever offset those who choose to have 5, 10 or even 12 offspring in their life.
A Vietnamese friend once explained that in Vietnam, people have large families as infant mortality was quite high; to the point that children would be referred to by their birth order for several years until it was certain they would survive. So the oldest would be "First One" then so on and so forth. With modern medicine, infant mortality has plummeted but cultures still believe they need large families.
I agree, family planning is one tool to mitigate our future issues.
What could possibly go wrong?
I thought these civilization-collapse nuts were fixated on December 21. There's not going to *be* a next year, right?! If most think tanks watched a puppy growing for the first month of its life, they would conclude that one year from now it will be 300-foot-tall monster trashing downtown Tokyo.
The next time you're driving to work, take a glance to your left.
That 30' wide median strip? You know, the one they pay some public works teams to spend an entire week mowing several times a season? Yeah. Fully exposed to sunlight, easy access, on a major transportation route.
Now, granted, you're not going to want to grow food veggies in the median of a major interstate? Too much toxins from the exhaust and worse. But now that we've got the idea in your heads, take a look at the medians in your local town. Definitely not as much traffic, but sometimes just as wide, covered in very thirsty, very costly grass and/or other landscape plants, and 100% under-utilized.
So. When it looks like the global food riots are going to start, show up at your local council/zoning board and say, "Here's what's going on, here's what we're going to do about it. We will be growing food. We will take care of all maintenance and upkeep, and save the town (insert 5-6 figure amount) of dollars per year. If you interfere, we will sue you into oblivion. If you try to arrest us, we'll keep coming in until we're all incarcerated. Then YOU will have to pay for feeding us."
[End Of Line]
People seem to forget models don't prove SHIT. Models model. So they are only as useful as their predictive ability. However you can't know that until you've released a model, and see what happens. If your model repeatedly makes correct predictions (and fails to make incorrect ones) then you can say it is a good model.
It doesn't mean shit if everything is historical. Yes, yes, you tweaked it until it modeled history accurately. Of course, that's a good first step. However that could just mean you made a model that generates a line in the right shape, rather than actually models anything useful. You have to wait and see how it does at predicting reality before you go and claim it is useful.
This also seems like a good case of "correlation isn't causation." So there's a correlation. Great, that means fuck-all. Another explanation for a bunch of riots would be things like the Arab Spring concept in that people see their neighbors rise up against their oppressors and say "Hey, we should do that too!"
It's a cycle. Overpopulation requires more arable land for agriculture. When there isn't any, it's created, such as the San Joaquin Valley. This valley was basically desert. This was done by damming a few rivers and irrigating the land. That being said you can only convert so many deserts for agriculture, you start to run out of water, even if you still receive your normal annual rain fall. That would be a drought caused by over population. Same thing is is happening in Phoenix. The water table continues to drop and the aquifers are becoming harder and harder to reach. Not due to climate change but by more people.
So dealing with overpopulation needs to go hand in hand with changing how we generate and use energy.
What could possibly go wrong?
It would help if major religions would say "Go forth and multiply, check, done" too.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Sadly, the San Joaquin Valley faces continuing pressure due to salinization. Every drop of water that irrigates the SJ desert contains a bit of salt, and when those drops evaporate, that salt is left behind, slowly increasing the toxicity of the soil. Worse, as the richness of the soil degrades due to the farming, its ability to handle saline conditions further declines.
This valley will work for now, but it's really only a short-term solution unless we work out. The only way we could go longer term would be to introduce the permaculture concepts put forward by the likes of Geoff Lawton which emphasizes long term sustainability and enhancing biodiversity alongside your crops.
BTW, this technology is gaining traction in India where the already-poor soil was boosted by fertilizers only for a short time. Now, the cost of the fertilizers has grown sky high since more is needed every year to achieve similar performance, permaculture offers similar yield performance without any of the costs of various chemicals.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
And by the "Bush administration" you mean "the 16th century markets from which modern commodity market derive". There has never been a commodity market where buying and selling without taking possession wasn't the norm.
You're expressing a strong opinion about a highly technical subject that you know nothing about. It will only be karma when your boss does the same.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I don't think they're wrong. I own about 500 acres of farmland that I rent out and this is something I've been watching the past couple years and something that a lot of the ag people have been warning about is the fact even the United States as of right now has less than a 90 day carry over (seems like I read something the other day that the supply had now dropped to something like 60 days). The carry over was 18 months in the 1950's. Frankly I find that a little scary.
That means that if there is a major disruption somewhere in the supply chain(oil supplies disrupted), another summer or two like this past one, or some major event like a large volcanic eruption on the scale of Krakatoa with global weather impact and the United States is 3 months away from having no food. This isn't the price becomes too high for people to afford, this is literally THERE IS NO FOOD. The physical supply doesn't exist. And that's kind of scary.
Let's just take this past summer. The United States produces roughly 40% of the world's corn. We'll be lucky to produce half that due to the weather this summer. That means globally about 20% of the global supply of corn this year is gone, it doesn't exist this year. Furthermore drought in Russia, Europe, and Australia means they aren't having bumper crops to offset that loss.
Short term that means people will likely turn to rice to replace corn as their staple. Rice prices aren't much changed from a year ago. (We raise Rice and Soybeans so that's what I primarily pay attention to). Soybean prices on the other hand are the highest I've seen it in my lifetime. And I remember early in the summer the commodity traders were assuming a near perfect yield this year in the prices of corn and soybeans, et. al. and that was *before* the drought. (I know, why those idiots were assuming that in the first place is another discussion)
What has surprised me is how little this gets reported in the main stream press. The only reason I know anything about it is the fact I own farms and read some of the ag publications so I have some idea of what is going on in that world.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I need to start training my kids at killing other kids in archery so that we can win the games this year?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Oh jeez I hate this argument.
The more people you have the less likely you'll have another Einstein, because he'll be too busy trying to feed himself and not die of the liquid shits to work on theoretical physics problems to get you your FTL spaceship.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
In 2011, more corn was used in ethanol production than for livestock feed for the first time ever. Ethanol accounted for 5.05 billion bushels which at 56 pounds per bushel (shelled) comes to 141.4 million tons. Worldwide corn production in 2011 was 867.5 million tons. That's over 16% of the global corn crop used for ethanol production.
1. Riots aren't always a bad thing when they precipitate the overthrow of autocratic regimes and create the possibility for self-rule. It remains to be seen the extent to which this is true of the "Arab Spring", but there's a distinct possibility that at least some of the affected states will see lasting and positive change.
2. It's not necessarily a given that a warming planet will lead to food shortages. Some guys in the U.K. seem to think we could see yields (for some crops) increase by 50% by 2050. They could very well be wrong. Or they could be right.
Let's hope it doesn't become an instruction manual like 1984.
Yup. My grandmother grew up near Mobile Alabama, close to the Florida panhandle on the Gulf coast. She would jog to and from school (they called it "trottin'" instead of jogging though) because occasionally kids were killed by Florida panthers along the way. She had a lot of brothers and sisters, most of whom didn't live to adulthood.
You tend to be inclined to produce more offspring when there's a real concern they might get EATEN BY GODDAMN PANTHERS on the way to school.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Current industrial farming practices use 10 calories of energy (mostly from petrochemicals) to produce 1 calorie of food.
Contemporary farming techniques are heavily dependent on petrochemicals to produce fertilizer.
Contemporary farming techniques deplete topsoil faster than it will naturally replenish.
That said, there're a lot of dandelions and wild garlic in most yards (and more acreage in lawns in the U.S. than any single crop).
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Great to hear from someone so close to actual food production.
When it comes to rice is there really enough slack in the system to make a dent in the missing corn? My understanding is the amount of rice traded internationally is actually quite small (most is eaten in the same country it's grown in). I'm sure you/your tenants will get a great price for this year's crop, but realistically it seems the only place we'll be able to find slack in the US food system would be relaxing the ethanol mandate for one growing season (seems unlikely especially in an election year) or significantly reducing meat production. It's sounding like the second may already be happening, with many ranchers and feedlots thinning out their herds drastically this fall because the math shows they won't be able to afford to feed all their livestock at the prices corn is headed towards this winter.
In countries without a lot of meat consumption it's not clear what people will be able to do besides spend a lot more of their budgets on food or start missing a lot of meals.
The derivatives market is worth $800,000,000,000,000.00.
That's eight hundred trillion with a "T". It doesn't represent equity in any company, or commodity. It's not for business expansion or for building new factories or for putting new seed in the ground.
It's $800 trillion in real money that's used on a big monopoly board by extremely wealthy individuals and corporations. Remember, this is not the stock market, it is not shares in companies or bars of gold or bushels of corn. It's part of a big game of Texas Hold 'Em where if you lose, you send the bill to the taxpayers of some country or other.
It also happens to represent more than TEN TIMES the gross domestic products of all countries in the world. The derivatives market is worth several times that of the entire world. Possibly disruptive, no?
More than 3 BILLION people (50% of the world population, give or take) exist on less than $2/day.
There are about 1100 billionaires in the world and about 10 million millionaires (0.15%). About 25% of the world population is unemployed.
There is a whole lot of research that shows replicable, reliable correlation between growing wealth and income disparity and growth in every single negative metric of human society, from disease, to violence, to mental illness and back again. Not one bit of research that shows a positive effect of growing disparity of income and wealth.
In arguably the most prosperous of nations, the US, 40% of the population has a net worth of zero. The average person over 55 will retire with enough wealth to live for about 2.5 years. And much of the rest of the world only dreams about this kind of prosperity.
"Food riots?" Yah think? But just remember, it's not because there's not enough wealth to go around. You come up with a solution, because I'm going back down to the bunker.
You are welcome on my lawn.
In the United States most food commodities required you take possession. To be fair, a lot of that started under Clinton (who was a fiscal conservative, only liberal on social issues), but as the article points out things didn't really get going on the speculative markets until 2008, round the Obama was handed Bush's mess to clean up (and a Congress full of DINOs, Democrats in Name Only).
:P.
There are many, many things in this world that are complex. Physics, chemistry, mathematics. Economics isn't one of them. People are simple, scared and greedy. Google the phrases 'Southern Strategy' and 'Vulture Capitalism' and you pretty much have everything you need to know to understand it. Everything else is just tossing numbers around.
But don't take my word for it. Take this example. How do the Rich avoid taxes? Complex and amazing tax loopholes? Not so much. Turns out they just borrow money below interest (loaned to them by rich buddies in charge of the banking system) and live off that. That's the best irony in the world. The super wealthy are some of the poorest people in the world. No money (to tax) you see. Again, google it. I found that linked article for you, so you can do the rest
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Thinking the world has some fixed population limit that we've passed is thinkingthat technologicl advancement has stopped. Not likely.
That's not the reality that I'm afraid of. The reality I'm afraid of is the absolute truth that every biological system on earth is in decline right now. How does your technology return the ability of our biological systems to support more life? How are you going to replace all of the world's collapsed fisheries or herd populations? How is technology going to make crop yields grow when you don't have enough oil to create fertilizer, or transport fertilizer, or power earth moving equipment, harvesting equipment, or get the food back to the cities where it's needed before it rots?
The earth is a closed system, and really isn't any different from a very large spaceship. Every indicator points to our life support systems being on the downward slope, and with the addition of the change in climate, all of our current models are getting less and less useful and certainly less predictable.
Since our largest economies are now based on speculative models, you're forcing people with virtually no money to compete with people who have virtually unlimited amounts of money. This will lead to huge price fluctuations which will cause societies on the edge of subsistence to collapse, and that's what, two billion people right now? When one third of the world doesn't have enough food to eat, or doesn't know how much bread will cost tomorrow or the day after, you can guarantee that instability will be a problem.
The earth will regain balance eventually, and our population, as a result of physics, will return to a sustainable size. The question is whether our civilizations will survive with the planet.
what you bought actually only has a 2 year shelf life, I don't care what their marketing department tells you.
The supplier's website says that with mild, dry storage conditions, the food is good for up to 25 years. My guess is their estimate is closer to the truth than yours.
How long has that supplier been in business? How long has the manufacturer of the goods they carry been in business? I'd be a little concerned about some company just jumping on the Y2K, Mayan 2012, etc bandwagon and not planning on being around for very long (in the fly-by-night business sense, not the apocalypse sense). I'd want to know a little more about who is making that 25 year claim.
Plus a supplier's claim is more suspicious than a manufacturer's claim. I saw some sort of food hoarder on TV with a similar cache. I recognize one of the brand names, "Mountain House" a quite respectable company making food for backpackers and such. The hoarder claimed something around 25 years too. Strange, the "Mountain House" freeze dried dehydrated vacuum sealed food packets I recently purchased for a backpacking trip had a use by 2017 date, a 5 year shelf life.
Let's hope it doesn't become an instruction manual like 1984.
Ever since the novel "1984" was published, back in 1949, the world has been actively "prepared" for the fruition
Do you know that the world population more than double, - almost triple - since 1949?
Back in the 1950's, global population of human being was around 2,556,000,000
Now, 7,000,000,000 and rising, by the second !!
With that many more mouths to feed, and the planet ain't getting any bigger, it sure is a recipe for disasters, big disasters
And with big disasters come big opportunities, for some
I won't be surprised at another global calamity 10 to 30 years in the future - and by then, blood may flow like rivers and corpse may pile up like hills and mountains - it would apocalypse, in every sense of the term
And I hope I will be dead before that happen
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Firstly, fructose doesn't spike GI which means it doesn't promote fat formation nor induce lethargy.
Secondly, even the infamous HFCS has been shown to be no worse for weight problems than sucrose.
Two years of freeze dried foods and Meals Ready to Eat and your colon will be rioting even with a full stomach.
Just stay away from open flame and you should be all right.
:-P
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Only true if you use brine for irrigation. In Arabia, most water is produced by reverse osmosis or distillation and the ground water table is actually rising due to the run-off from farms and cities. Fresh water will not polute the soil and is sustainable if you have cheap energy.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
The high price of oil is largely what is driving grain prices up. Higher water prices are also not helping.
I can't speak for the rest of the planet, but in the US many politicians have been attracted to the idea of getting the US off oil by artifically raising the price of oil. Well, that's an idea but there are consequences. And one of those consequences is that everything linked to fuel goes up in price as well.
The other issue is water. Many cities have grown in size while not increasing their water resources. They haven't built reservoirs at the same rate that their populations have increased. And as a result, when there is a water shortage they run out of water much faster then they should. In the real world yearly rainfall is not constant. It changes from year to year. But it is fairly consistent decade over decade. so what you do is have storage such that you can survive a few bad years by gathering extra water in the good years. THIS IS BASIC. The Romans had this down to a science.
What the cities have been doing instead is pilfering the farmer's water to make up their own shortfall. They figure "oh the farmers use lots of water, why build more infrastructure when it's easier to just gank their water." Well fine... genius move... Farmers in Australia started literally... LITERALLY committing suicide when the local government started taking their water away. They were losing their family farms... and all because they couldn't get any water. And why? Because the cities didn't build water infrastructure that had been planned over 50 years prior to that point.
So why is food going up? Because politicians are dicking over farmers. It's the sort of short sighted penny wise and pound foolish thinking we've come to expect from the political class. They only think about the next election and never about planning for the future.
It's really pretty simple. If you want more food... grow more food. How do you grow more food? Provide what farmers need to grow food.
That is... fuel for farm equipment (unless you want to mobilize 60 percent of the labor force to do farm labor), oil for pesticides (unless you want upwards of 50 percent of all produce to be eaten by insects before it reaches market), fertilizer (unless you want farmers to use 80 percent more land and 80 percent more water), and of course... Water.
The cities need to stop stealing the farmer's water and politicians need to stop dicking with the fuel supply.
That or enjoy spiking food prices and global instability as large portions of the developing world start literally starving and things get really ugly.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
"I think it's every woman's responsibility to have as many kids as they possibly can." - Some chick said that to me the other day. For real. I asked her how the planet would support all those people in a couple generations and she said she had never thought about it that way before. Unfortunately, she already has several children.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
It's not the amount of food that's the problem (there's more than enough food for twice the wold population already), but the distribution.
Basically the population is decreasing (save for immigration) in the areas with surplus food production and increasing in areas that's already a long way past a sustainable food production.
So I doubt we'll see true food riots. We might see food mass migrations and we might see riots using food as an excuse, but not the hungry masses rising up.
I have no doubt that food will be an excuse for some riots. Usually riots seems to originate with groups of habitual criminals offended that the police are doing their job, and using either stupidities committed by the police or unsubstantiated rumors to cause a widespread reaction and turn it into a full riot and thus a free for all crime spree, complete with looting, arson and massive vandalism.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Yes that's clearly an exhaustive list of turn of the century panther attacks.
She was attacked herself once, but a dog put itself between the panther and her. After reporting this, family and townspeople went out and shot five panthers.
My guess: when people got attacked by panthers in the deep south at the turn of the century they didn't go filing reports to the Wikipediary, they went out and shot the damn things.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.