Slashdot Mirror
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?
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!"
Oh fuck off, you're no better than they are. You're just lucky enough not to have been born there.
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.
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.
all people are born equal. However, all cultures are not.
That's true, but it flies in the face of your earlier comment that you have little sympathy for people born in the Middle East. Or maybe the two statements can coexist and you're just suffering from a severe empathy-deficiency.
I agree with you that there are objectively bad cultures. They're objectively worse because they reliably produce worse outcomes for their citizens as measured by most any metric you can come up with. But no one chooses to be born there. As you say, we're all born equal. So saying you have no pity for those with the misfortune to be born in a bad place is rather cold-hearted.
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.
If your mother is malnourished, your baby body (including your brain) will not be as fit as that of a baby who had a healthy, well fed mother - no matter how many times people say things like "all people are born equal".
If you continue to be malnourished throughout your childhood and beyond puberty, it will show in your physical and intellectual development.
The good news is, when you, trapped as you are in your intellectually and physically stunted body, fail to either improve your culture or transcend it, you will probably lack the ability to be properly insulted by the patronizing disapproval and weary headshaking some of those who were lucky enough to be born in a less dysfunctional culture will indulge in upon receiving word of your failure.
Bonus points if one of the reasons your culture is so shitty is because your poverty stricken country has had its wealth and resources sucked out of it decades (or generations) ago by vertically integrated private interests from a foreign land - maybe even the same one all those scolding cultural chauvinists hail from! - which took what it could of the wealth of your land, and gave as little back to your countrymen as possible.
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.
Have you every tried fighting a war while starving?
Also, you're forgetting the fact that none of these Arab countries were democracies: "holding their governments accountable" is pretty tough when the government has a huge military force and the ordinary people have none.
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.
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 !
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."
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) --