Price Of Food And Social Unrest Are Connected

Lagi, Bertrand, Bar-Yam

Remember All Those "Pro-Democracy" Protests Last Year? Here's What They Were Really About... -- Henry Blodget, Business Insider

The widespread protests across the Middle East and northern Africa in last year's "Arab Spring" were often viewed as the awakening of a critical region to the virtues of democracy.

And they may have had something to do with that.

But a paper by three New England-based researchers suggests the coordinated timing of all these protests was caused by something far more simple:

Skyrocketing food prices.

When food prices hit a certain critical level, Marco Lagi, Karla Z. Bertrand, and Yaneer Bar-Yam show, people tend to turn to violence--because their desperation hits a level at which they have nothing left to lose.

As the chart below shows, the Arab Spring protests, along with earlier protests in the region, coincided with two huge peaks in global food prices.

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My Comment: Governments now have a formula to know when they are approaching a crisis that threatens their power.