Ultimately is it about prices indices or actual food, making it a more interesting signalling and modeling event - more about the riots and not actually about the food or that famine has already achieved disastrous levels and that it is a measure not about food but about violence, public order, or state instability. Is it exceeding carrying capability and signalling sustainability failure or is it more about failures in governance and governmentality.
OTOH are zombies eating enough brains these days.
There is an obvious relationship between strife and food – if you starve a nation they will fight to get food. This relationship has been pinned down by an organisation called the Complex Systems Institute, CSI. They show that the food riots break out when the food price index rises above a certain critical level. An example was the Arab Spring. http://necsi.edu/...
Governments wanting to avoid riots like those that helped spark the Arab Spring should work to keep global food prices from doubling, a new study has found.
The U.K.'s Anglia Ruskin University claims to have identified the point in food price inflation that makes riots and domestic conflict more likely.
Using the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization's Food Price Index (FAO FPI), which measures monthly price changes for an international basket of foodstuffs, the study found that breaching index levels of 148 increases the risk of violent food riots by varying degrees -- depending on how politically stable the country 's politics were. Normal FAO FPI levels register near 100.
Shocks could include export bans or crop losses due to bad weather or droughts.
The research identified 17 countries most in danger of price-linked food riots -- including Nigeria, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya and Syria -- posing a 36.7 percent risk if thresholds are breached.
The study examined food riots that took place between 2004 and 2012, which included those in North Africa and the Middle East during the Arab Spring, and those in India following massive floods in 2007.
Four groups of countries were identified within the World Bank's political instability rankings, with corresponding risk levels if thresholds were breached. Currently, Russia, India and China face a 17.8 percent risk if food prices double.
And then there's the RW apocalyptic fear of the Other:
Food policy interventions aimed at protecting the consumption of the poor can be justified on both equity and efficiency grounds. The health and nutrition of the poor are a priority for reasons of equity, but they are also public goods because too little healthful and nutritious food may be provided at market prices. And agricultural activity is high-risk, and markets provide limited means of risksharing, so government support may be warranted. While these considerations provide a rationale for policy action, public policy is constrained by several factors, including political economy and efficiency considerations as well as organizational and institutional capacity.
Food prices
Public policy needs to account for food price volatility, the incentives and disincentives of policy actions, and fiscal implications. Implicit subsidies, such as price controls, keep agricultural prices artificially low and thereby adversely affect agricultural supply. In contrast, targeted policy interventions such as school feeding programs, food stamps, and food for work programs protect poor people’s real income and insulate their consumption from volatile food prices. While well targeted programs achieve welfare objectives at the lowest possible cost, there are also costs associated with implementing, enforcing, and monitoring targeted programs. A realistic appraisal of costs, benefits, and links with other sectors in the economy should thus be the basis of policy interventions.
Governments are focusing on strategies to help households cope, recognizing that macroeconomic policy can play only a limited role. Rising food prices pose a serious challenge to monetary policy. On the one hand tightening monetary policy would be ineffective in the face of an exogenous shock to relative prices—which may be behind recent food price inflation. Moreover, tightening monetary policy could choke the agricultural supply response and dampen growth in countries experiencing a slowdown at the same time that food and energy prices are high. On the other hand loosening monetary policy, driven by the need to manage capital inflows and real exchange rate appreciations, would exacerbate the situation. Governments are also reorienting trade policy by, for example, easing import restrictions. Eliminating tariffs can help boost supply, but if global prices remain high and volatile, well designed policy interventions to protect the poor would still be needed.
http://web.worldbank.org/...