Unrest: Hungry for More?
Rising global food prices are nearing an alarming indicator for food riots and violent unrest.
On the 4th of March, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) released the latest update to its Food Price Index. The update showed that global food prices had risen for the 9th consecutive month, and are now at six-year-highs. The current rise in prices has been attributed to (among other things) the COVID-19 pandemic, poor weather in key growing areas, increasing demand, and rising oil and fertiliser prices.
These rises can be illustrated below:
As can be seen, the prices, while high, are still somewhat lower than spikes in 2008, and 2011. What is concerning, however, is that during both of these periods, the high food prices led to significant instability around the world. Particularly in the 2011 spike, food price-related unrest (and so-called ‘food riots’) was linked to the collapse of governments throughout the MENA region as well the outbreak of several destructive civil wars as part of the Arab Spring.
Research by Marco Lagi, Karla Z. Bertrand and Yaneer Bar-Yam at the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI) looked into this phenomenon and came to a rather dire conclusion. They found that once the Food Price Index exceeds a value of 210, food riots occur. It is worth noting that in 2013, the FAO rescaled its Food Price Index, so a value of 210 on the old scale corresponds approximately to a value of 125 on the new scale.
“It is reasonable to hypothesize that when this underlying trend exceeds the threshold, the security of vulnerable populations will be broadly and persistently compromised,” the NECSI paper stated.
This threshold line can be plotted against the above graph as shown below:
Here we see that the current rise in food prices has not yet reached the threshold for food riots, however, it is getting alarmingly close. It is worth noting that two locations that have experienced food riots in the last 6 months, Nigeria and Sudan have seen price rises much greater than the global average. The situation is particularly bad in Sudan, where a devaluation of the local currency combined with displacement due to tribal clashes has led to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSNET) projecting large parts of the country to reach ‘Crisis’ levels by mid-year.
Globally, the trends which have caused prices to rise over the last year, are expected to continue in the near-term. Such trends include rising demand from China and the continued impact of the Coronavirus pandemic.
“People will have to get used to paying more for food,” Sylvain Charlebois, director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University in Canada, told Bloomberg. “It’s only going to get worse.”
Some commentators have also pointed the finger at climate change playing a role, however, recent work by researchers at the Center for Climate Systems Research at Columbia University and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research has shown that “these [regional] production declines would lead to only a moderate impact on global food web stability.”
Instead, these researchers found that a larger problem existed in the form of trade restrictions and precautionary purchases made by important food exporters. Some such restrictions have occurred as a result of the pandemic, yet, the study found that restrictions in as few as two producers (Ukraine and Argentina) could result in significant destabilisation in global food prices.
Going into the future it will be important to analyse both the destabilising nature of food prices themselves, as well as the key factors that lead to them to rise. In the meantime, alarm bells should be ringing as the FAO Food Price index climbs towards the threshold value.