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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
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
Not a lack of food. A lack of cheap food. When you spend a large percentage of your income on food, it matters more.
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.
Last I knew, those "experts" were pretty much on target -- vast swathes of humanity have been starving to death since there were vast swathes of humanity. Malthus totally got it right except for two developments he couldn't foresee. The first (the Green Revolution) is only a temporary fix-- all it ultimately did was to increase the carrying capacity of the planet, not to change the basics of Malthusian economics. The second factor (effective birth control) is the only reason you can remain ignorant enough to call Malthus wrong.
Listen to what I say, not what I mean...
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.
"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?
Because they're not claiming sensationalistic Malthusian version of "we're doomed, there are too many people" and instead merely pointing out that people revolt when they don't make enough to feed their family.
The WHO warns about similar numbers of people facing obesity problems as they do starvation problems.
That's an entirely different topic. Obesity is above all related to sugar consumption -- or more specifically, fructose consumption -- if recent developments in nutrition are anything to go by. If we distribute snack bars, sweet water and fruit juice in Japan, China or Africa, we'll start seeing rampant obesity there too. Make that since we do, actually.
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.
You've the wrong culprit there.
Even accounting for the occasional drought such as this year in the US, we indeed currently produce more that enough food to feed everyone on the planet and more. The primary withholders of food, however, are the major food exporters. Chief among them, the USA and the EU, so as to keep food prices high enough to sustain farmers -- which makes sense, when you scratch the surface, since the last thing you want in case of total war is to depend on food imports.
At any rate, and contrary to what you're suggesting, no government in its right mind willfully withholds food from its population. Food shortage is the surest path to revolts and uprising. Because when you've nothing to lose, you basically lose it.
It would help if major religions would say "Go forth and multiply, check, done" too.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
We have a planet with a comfortable capacity of 5 billion
[citation needed]
Last I knew, those "experts" were pretty much on target -- vast swathes of humanity have been starving to death since there were vast swathes of humanity.
Which makes such a prediction pretty useless. What those experts are predicting is a massive uptick in starvation rates. And yes, they have been consistently wrong. In modern times, there has never been a global, sustained, starvation die-off in the vein of a Malthusian Catastrophe.
Malthus totally got it right except for two developments he couldn't foresee.
In other words, he got it wrong.
The second factor (effective birth control) is the only reason you can remain ignorant enough to call Malthus wrong.
It's more than just birth control; it's a whole slew of factors that contribute to demographic transition. And yes, it's the primary reason Malthus was wrong. One of his fundamental assumptions was:
"That population does invariably increase when the means of subsistence increase"
Demographic transition has demonstrated that this is false. Human population growth is not limited solely by the availability of subsistence; it self-limits given the presence of other factors that tend to occur as prosperity increases.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
The "comfortable capacity" of the planet is redefined every generation by alarmists to a bit less that whatever the population happens to be. Funny how that works.
Spending 80% on food is still a step up from subsistance farming. It's a step in the right direction (better than 100%) for a great many people. More steps will come.
It never fails to amaze me how many /. posters seem not to understand that technology makes us more efficient with the same resources. "Technology" doesn't mean the latest Apple product - it's every step forward in allowing more people to live "comfortably" on the same resources. Thinking the world has some fixed population limit that we've passed is thinkingthat technologicl advancement has stopped. Not likely.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
You are talking about removing food, as opposed to continued denial of food. African warlords know that if the people have enough energy to stand, they will oppose the warlord, so he makes sure that the people starve. International aid is seized and resold on the black market. It gets the warlord income and helps keep control.
What do you do when you have nothing to lose, but so little caloric intake that you can't even lift your own head?
Learn to love Alaska
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 hear that argued by the religious right anytime the subject of overpopulation comes up
Yay, political/religious generalizations straight off the bat. Clearly, this post is going to be quality.
We have a planet with a comfortable capacity of 5 billion
Source? Or did you just pull a convenient number out of your backside? WHO estimates of human population levelling (~10 billion) place it somewhere below the median range of the estimated carrying capacity of the earth.
I put the people who downplay the potential for mass starvation in the same category as people who deny climate change. They're both whistling past the graveyard so they don't have to make any sacrifices in terms of changing their lifestyle.
Probably because there's no need to change their lifestyle. There is not a finite amount of wealth; the fact that western nations are wealthy does not necessitate that undeveloped nations be kept so. As an example, look at Malawi; within five years, with a fairly simple improvement in the form of a fertiliser subsidy, Malawi went from famine to being a food exporter. The same thing happened in India with the Green Revolution. Now imagine if they applied more modern techniques, like widespread irrigation, or high-yield strains of grain.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
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.
My current net worth is about $600,000 and I have this in my basement. I'm pretty sure I don't have to worry.
Yes you do. Now we know we can raid your basement for food.
Even during the great depression food riots only rarely occurred and while there was civil unrest it was far from panic or massive
My great grandmother begs to differ enough that I had to give her THREE Swedish fish to calm her down. Downplaying the poverty and struggle of that era is a gross troll. People ate days old "bread" soaked in maple syrup, scooping off the mold. They rationed toilet paper because they COULDN'T AFFORD an extra roll, or they would starve. Pump your brakes, turn around, and go back the way you came.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Wrong.
Apple INVENTED technology.
Then they patented it.
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.
In fact, every major famine in the 20th Century was caused NOT by major crop failures, but by deliberate political policy or the effects of war.
Famous examples of this include the forced collectivization of farms in the Ukraine between 1928 and 1933, the time of the warlords in China during the 1920's and 1930's when fighting disrupted food supply, the effects of the the invasion of China by Japan (which also disrupted food supply), the "Great Leap Forward" in China that seriously affected food production, and the political policies of dictators in Africa during the second half of the 20th Century.
My grandfather's family left England during the Great Depression, because they were so poor, they could barely afford bread and dripping, if that (dripping, I was told, was a bit of a treat). They ended up swapping a life of borderline starvation for what amounted to indentured servitude on a farm in the middle of outback Australia, but at least they got to eat. My old man nonetheless spoke of killing feral rabbits because that was the only meat they could afford.
My other grandfather was quite literally enslaved by the Allies for two years after WW2, labouring on a wheat farm, because there were massive food shortages after the Russians had done burning, looting and raping Germany.
My grandmother was billeted to a family in Switzerland during the war because her family wouldn't afford to feed her (war apparently isn't good for kids either).
So yeah, hunger is certainly within living memory for most of our families. Thank God that Western civilization has the basics right, and that we're all obese two short generations later.
Libertarians have about as much interest in history as they do in economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, or pretty much any other body of knowledge. Their's is an imaginary utopia where temples are raised to the Unseen Hand Of The Unregulated Free Market, and the rich are free to enjoy their wealth unfettered by any necessity beyond purely voluntary noblesse oblige and the poor have won the freedom to starve without the horrible fear of the evils of state intervention to prevent their downward spiral, and the working classes are free to pick the master that they shall be wage slaves to, or if they choose, to join the poor and fight for the kindly alms of the rich.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Wrong! You know why? Bill Gates, Richard Murdoch and Donald Trump on a grand scale eat about the same amout of food as you do. Also, even with food taken out of the equation if their net worth is somewhere in the realm of $3 billion and your net worth is something like 100,000, they're not buying 30,000 times as many taxable goods as you.
This is why income tax is a good thing.
Two years of freeze dried foods and Meals Ready to Eat and you will be rioting even with a full stomach.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
Much of the "green revolution" occurred because of extra energy input in the form of oil. Cheap oil allowed for the expansion of nitrogen fertilizer, pesticides and mechanical harvesting. While the last two don't use an enormous amount of oil, the first does. As fossil fuels become more expensive, so does nitrogen based fertilizer.
So there is likely a limit to the ability of said revolution to feed the planet. And I'm ignoring other potential limiters such as water, salinization of croplands and many others.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
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.
My current net worth is about $600,000 and I have this in my basement. I'm pretty sure I don't have to worry.
Yes you do. Now we know we can raid your basement for food.
I'm not sure why this was modded as funny because it's true.
The problem with being more prepared than your neighbors for a disaster is that when they get hungry and notice that you and your family are not, then they'll be busting down your door to take your food. No matter how well armed you are, if you have something worth stealing, there will always be someone better armed than you and enough desperate people with nothing left to lose to overwhelm your defenses.
And how exactly do you propose to create this rising tide? By cutting taxes to the wealthy, and somehow, out of a sense of honor and obligation, they will gladly replace the lost government funds that go into education, work programs, etc.? And how would this help anyone on welfare when the causes of a recession are external such as, I dunno, the meltdown of a major currency over which the United States has absolutely no control whatsoever?
You don't have a model. You have an ideological religion, and one that would prove quickly intolerable to the majority of society. Governments since Rome, and probably long before, figured out that if you don't keep the masses fed, at the very least you create massive social, and ultimately political instability. Hence the "bread" in "bread and circuses". Yes, it cost the Roman treasury plenty of coin, much of that gained from taxes, but the alternative was riots and social disorder, which were much more costly.
You don't prefer simplicity, you prefer magical Libertarian invocations. Back in the real world, real people, often through no fault of their own, face crises of an existential nature; whether it is health woes, long-term unemployment or underemployment, natural and man-made disasters. I would like you to go to them and prattle at them about how cutting them off at the knees will make the walk tall.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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."
The solution to these problems is to pit them against one another.
Simply cultivate a quantity of desperate people with nothing to lose who are willing to shoot pesky trespassers in exchange for a small cut of your food. Getting the implementation just right can be tricky, but this(along with appeals to the authority of the invisible friends of the powers that be) has been a fundamental part of human civilization for pretty much all of human history...
Like it has in the USA for the last 30 years you mean ? Where ever decreasing taxes have resulted in worker's wages going nowhere while productivity (and corporate profits) has skyrocketed ?
I like theories that agree with reality. Yours doesn't.
Try honey. It's probably the longest-lasting foodstuff you'll find naturally. Unfiltered honey, properly stored, has a shelf life measured in millenia. Bees have been co-evolving with bacteria and fungi for millions of years in a battle to make a microbe-proof honey. The bees won.
A government is an entity which has a local monopoly on the use of force. The "competitive market" for governments is called warfare. In reducing government, you are both eliminating economies of scale, and creating a power vacuum: If you do not grant a government the right to use force against business entities, you are de facto granting those business entities that right. If you want to know what this looks like, there is a plenitude of historical examples: any time a first-world business interest encounters a third-world resource the pattern repeats. The British East India Company (India), the Dole Fruit Company (Hawai'i), the United Fruit Company (Central America) all enjoyed that libertarian ideal of being more powerful than local governments.
It has been a recognized principle that governments derive their right to use force from the consent of the governed. This is not a business transaction, nor should it be. The market is not a solution for everything -- it fails spectacularly in the case of natural monopolies. It should be perfectly obvious that government is a natural monopoly. If you want to open that market to competition, then you're frankly insane, but I will promise you that I will make every effort to out-compete you.
Individual rights are not worthless, nor is it wrong to champion them. Governments exist in balance with liberty; they should be resisted at every step, but to dispute their necessity is to eradicate the basis of democracy. Ultimately libertarianism dictates that man is only answerable to himself, and for himself. It would certainly be a better world if men were islands of virtuous selfdom. However, the strongest basis for virtue is that which perpetuates the species; unless you're willing to tell that to go hang, you must acknowledge that at some level the rights of society trump the rights of the individual. From there we differ only in degrees as to what other rights have preeminence.
If you have determined that your rights outweigh the rest of society or the species, one hopes that you will exempt yourself from the demands of society in whichever way is least detrimental to others -- I may recommend suicide -- and do be so good as to not reproduce while you're at it.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.