
We Are Now One Year Away From Global Riots, Complex Systems Theorists Say - dredmorbius
http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/9/10/we-are-now-one-year-and-counting-from-global-riots-complex-systems-theorists-say--2
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lifeguard
First off, Occupy professes non-violence and does not riot.

If you are reading these words, and you are a parent of young children, I want
you to conduct a thought experiment: Imagine you have no food in your home,
zero. Add to that you have enough money for one meal a day to be shared with
your kids. Your children are hungry and you can not feed them. Add to that
everyone on your block or neighborhood being as hungry as you are. Got this
picture? Now answer this question: Is there anything you would not do to feed
your hungry kids, stop them from crying?

edit: World food prices in total rose 25 percent in 2010.

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-
development/2011/jan/23/foo...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-
development/2011/jan/23/food-speculation-banks-hunger-poverty)

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-24/speculation-
swings-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-24/speculation-swings-may-
threaten-food-security-ministers-say.html)

I don't have kids, but I did a fast of only juice for a week so I know a bit
what it is to feel hungry. It makes you to strange things.

edit: why the down votes?

~~~
CamperBob2
_First off, Occupy professes non-violence and does not riot._

Isn't this like saying "Anonymous professes _____ and does not ______?" Anyone
can call themselves "Occupiers."

Food is pretty much a solved problem, at least in the US. It used to take
virtually the entire country's labor to feed itself. Now agriculture is a
single-digit percentage of the workforce.

Of course we can debate whether what's on the supermarket shelves should
really be called "food," but for most Americans the question has been settled
to their satisfaction. There aren't going to be any food riots in the US.

~~~
antidoh
Food is a solved problem as long as there are water and oil.

~~~
lifeguard
[http://www.paleycenter.org/collection/item/?q=charles+kuralt...](http://www.paleycenter.org/collection/item/?q=charles+kuralt&p=9&item=T77:0042)

that is from 1968

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powera
People have been predicting catastrophe for thousands of years. Without some
reason to believe these people (and "a graph that shows correlation between
some points that might well be cherrypicked" doesn't count), I see no reason
to give this article any credence.

~~~
dmix
Indeed, the data that correlates riots with food prices needs to be backed up
with more than that study.

In addition, I found this statement concluding the article to be completely
lacking support: "And it’s only going to get worse and worse and worse."

Why should we expect food prices / rioting to get worse and worse?

~~~
MaysonL
Because global climate is going to get worse and worse.

~~~
dmix
Source that this will cause high food prices?

From our standpoint, technology and automation will get better and better,
bringing the price of many things down.

Humans have demonstrated their ability to adapt to change.

~~~
kamaal
>Humans have demonstrated their ability to adapt to change.

And that realization only comes after some big wars, famines and disasters.

There are only a few instances where we have changed proactively.

Humans have always needed a wake up call.

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ajays
1 year away? It looks like we _are_ in a period of global riots: Tunisia,
Libya, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen. The sectarian violence in Iraq. Anarchy
in Somalia, South Sudan. I don't think we've ever seen so many independent
conflict areas.

~~~
nvmc
No we're not. Countries that have (or had) long standing dictatorships are
rioting. The closest the first world has had to a riot is when Canada lost
that hockey game.

~~~
grecy
What about the Occupy Protests in LA?

~~~
lifeguard
I would not even call the Black Bloc rioters. They use guerrilla tactics, hit
and run.

Occupy protests are not riots despite all the police in riot suits standing
around sweating.

~~~
lifeguard
Feds on hackernews, rad!

------
kamaal
In my country(India), for a while people have been predicting country wide
mass riots for fresh water(portable water). And it doesn't look surprising at
all, looking at where we are currently.

Cities are already faced with huge crisis for water. The under ground water
tables are depleting like crazy. There are villages which practically have no
water at all, they have to go around nearby villages to scout for water. There
are some states like Tamil Nadu, where water crisis is so imminent, if
Karnataka and Kerala were to stop releasing water they would be in serious
trouble. But this is not limited just to one state. The rivers are heavily
polluted, and beyond any meaningful usage. In the name of development and
growth, lakes and ponds and cities have been converted to spaces for buildings
and urban infrastructure. In early days nearly every village used to have a
lake, that culture vanished with appearance of tube wells. People are paying a
high price for that culture. This is likely to affect nearly every aspect of
India life.

With irrigation methods belonging to old stone age and population on an upward
trend. This is a classic recipe for disaster.

You may have your mobile phones, PC's, iPods and jeans pants. But without food
and water none of it is going to every workout well.

~~~
lifeguard
There were violent water riots in Peru last year when the government tried to
privatize the water supply. Prices whent up more than 100% I think.

Thank you for sharing this Kamaal.

~~~
brg
This is not true, the riots in Peru were over giving mining rights to foreign
interests: <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-13913776>.

Peru's water problems are real, and not easily summed up i the term
"privitization:" <http://www.economist.com/node/5526571>

~~~
lifeguard
I apologize for my mistake. I am thinking of another country in South America
that had public waterworks privatized briefly.

Thank you for the links.

------
kposehn
This is a false assumption as it ignores several mechanisms behind the riots
themselves.

A better conclusion would be "rising food prices make riots easier to incite".
The reason for the false assumption is the notion that the Arab Spring was
largely leaderless or organic; it was not.

Most of the Arab Spring protests were encouraged and incited by the Muslim
Brotherhood. The crippled economies were an excellent motivator for people to
take to the streets - they did, after all, not have any work to do.

However, food prices were only a small piece of the puzzle that made the
countries ripe for unrest. Many other components helped it along, including
our country's naive actions.

~~~
lifeguard
I think you are confusing "riot inciters" with community leaders.

~~~
yzhengyu
I would point out that one man's 'riot inciter' is another man's 'community
leader'.

------
javajosh
This article would have a lot more weight if it was served from mit.edu or
even cdc.gov.

~~~
shousper
That depends how much you trust your corporate or government funded
researchers :)

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Alex3917
Not sure this will pan out. It sounds like scientists are close to being able
to release new UG99 resistant wheat crops, which means there should be more
grain in the middle east by this time next year.

------
eevilspock
Change happens in spurts, only after things get bad enough to overcome apathy
(i.e. I agree that a good way to look at this is complex systems theory). The
last spurt was the 60's. The narcissism and growing wealth gap of the 90's and
00's are starting to make things bad enough again. I wouldn't be surprised if
it happens this decade.

------
pyre
I wonder how much bad the drought would have been had we done something like
cut back on livestock farming. If all of the water that goes towards growing
livestock feed + keeping the animals watered instead went directly to plants
grown for human consumption, would it have still been as bad?

~~~
bryanlarsen
Livestock farming is crucial to keeping grain prices stable. Human demand for
calories is relatively constant, for obvious reasons, but only accounts for a
small majority of grain demand in normal years. The remainder is consumed by
animals and by industrial processes.

When grain gets expensive, feeding animals becomes expensive. Raising them
becomes unprofitable, so farmers dump their animals onto the market which 1)
lowers the price of meat 2) makes a large number of meat calories available
for human consumption when they are needed most and 3) reduces the demand for
grain, dampening the price rise for grain.

This effect has mostly replaced the need for the long-term grain storage that
countries used to do.

So why isn't working now? One word: ethanol. President Obama could single-
handedly stop the current food crisis by eliminating or suspending ethanol
subsidies and mandates.

~~~
pyre

      > The remainder is consumed by animals and by
      > industrial processes.
    

Grain raised for livestock use is _only_ for livestock use. It's not like
"corn" is all the same thing. The corn that is used for livestock is not the
same corn that you buy at the store (on the cob or in a can). It's tasteless,
and so far as I know, not desirable for human consumption. You can't treat all
of the corn produced as usable for all uses that corn is put towards.

Also, if livestock is what regulates the grain market, then why do grain-
producers get such large (non-ethanol-related) subsidies?

~~~
bryanlarsen
"The corn that is used for livestock is not the same corn that you buy at the
store (on the cob or in a can). It's tasteless, and so far as I know, not
desirable for human consumption"

No, but it is suitable for turning into meal, which is how corn is consumed in
the third world, or into HFCS which is how corn is consumed in the first
world.

For other grains, it mostly works in the other direction in normal years. For
example, a farmer may try to grow wheat suitable for bread, but it rains while
the crop is in windrow, making it unsuitable for bread due to its low protein
content. It's graded as "feed" and fed to animals in a normal year. However,
you can still make bread from it, it just doesn't rise as well.

"why do grain-producers get such large (non-ethanol-related) subsidies?"
Because farmer's causes are sympathetic to voters for various different
reasons. (historical attachment, enjoyment of low food prices, stereotyping of
farmers as close to the land, lower populations in rural districts, and many
others)

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javajones
I would like to see the correlating data regarding the increase of ethanol in
gasoline with the rise in food prices/riots as well. I seem to recall that
just before the Haitian riots in 2008 there was an increase in ethanol mixture
of gasoline.

