A Hungry Future?

...It is estimated that across the globe 44 million people have been added to the estimated 1.2 billion already living below the poverty level of $1.25 a day according to the World Bank. This can be directly traced to the increase in food prices since 2010.

An increase in the price of what can be obtained, when the difference between sustainable and catastrophic is this small, is not just an individual tragedy. When thousands or even millions face such a reality it holds the potential to create massive social disorder. It should have surprised no one—although it seems to have surprised nearly everyone—that when the tipping point through a small price rise moved ever so slightly this Spring toward catastrophe, riots and uprisings erupted around the world, particularly in the Middle East. Hunger in the rest of the world will touch even the well fed because it is going to change the world. The American media hardly noticed, but the Egyptian Spring began not as a drive for democracy but as a food riot.

The bipolar geopolitical reality most of us have known all our lives ended in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union, but it has taken 20 years for it to become obvious. We are moving into a multipolar geopolitical world and, for the first time in 500 years—since Henry the Navigator—Caucasian cultures will not run the world. A different set of values will obtain, and many of those emerging countries will be profoundly changed by what hunger and its social unrest does to them. Our markets, our livelihoods, our lives, will feel the effect.

As with much of the developed world America's affluence has buffered a critical mass of us from such extreme sensitivity to supply and cost. But, because we have such a paltry and perverse social safety net—a situation almost unique in the developed world—that does not mean we are unscathed. Feeding America, the largest food program in the country, reported in 2010: “that hunger is increasing at an alarming rate in the United States, and our network is expanding its reach in response.”5...

Trends That Will Affect Your Future … The Coming Food Crisis—The Social Tsunami Headed Our Way