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Subject: Christian Parenti: Reading the World In a Loaf of Bread, Fiore Animated Cartoon: We Are The Whirled
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Subject: [LAAMN] We Are The Whirled | Mark Fiore's Animated Cartoon Site
http://www.markfiore.com/political-cartoons/watch-somalia-famine-al-shabab-obama-un-hunger-relief-animated-video-mark-fiore-animation
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Reading the World In a Loaf of Bread
Soaring Food Prices, Wild Weather, Upheaval, and a Planetful of Trouble
By Christian Parenti
What can a humble loaf of bread tell us about the world?
The answer is: far more than you might imagine. For one thing, that loaf can be “read” as if it were a core sample extracted from the heart of a grim global economy. Looked at another way, it reveals some of the crucial fault lines of world politics, including the origins of the Arab spring that has now become a summer of discontent.
Consider this: between June 2010 and June 2011, world grain prices almost doubled. In many places on this planet, that proved an unmitigated catastrophe. In those same months, several governments fell, rioting broke out in cities from
And in each of these situations, the initial trouble was traceable, at least in part, to the price of that loaf of bread. If these upheavals were not “resource conflicts” in the formal sense of the term, think of them at least as bread-triggered upheavals.
Growing Climate Change in a Wheat Field
Bread has classically been known as the staff of life. In much of the world, you can’t get more basic, since that daily loaf often stands between the mass of humanity and starvation. Still, to read present world politics from a loaf of bread, you first have to ask: of what exactly is that loaf made? Water, salt, and yeast, of course, but mainly wheat, which means when wheat prices increase globally, so does the price of that loaf -- and so does trouble.
To imagine that there’s nothing else in bread, however, is to misunderstand modern global agriculture. Another key ingredient in our loaf -- call it a “factor of production” -- is petroleum. Yes, crude oil, which appears in our bread as fertilizer and tractor fuel. Without it, wheat wouldn’t be produced, processed, or moved across continents and oceans.
And don’t forget labor. It’s an ingredient in our loaf, too, but not perhaps in the way you might imagine. After all, mechanization has largely displaced workers from the field to the factory. Instead of untold thousands of peasants planting and harvesting wheat by hand, industrial workers now make tractors and threshers, produce fuel, chemical pesticides, and nitrogen fertilizer, all rendered from petroleum and all crucial to modern wheat growing. If the labor power of those workers is transferred to the wheat field, it happens in the form of technology. Today, a single person driving a huge $400,000 combine, burning 200 gallons of fuel daily, guided by computers and GPS satellite navigation, can cover 20 acres an hour, and harvest 8,000 to 10,000 bushels of wheat in a single day.
Next, without financial capital -- money -- our loaf of bread wouldn’t exist. It’s necessary to purchase the oil, the fertilizer, that combine, and so on. But financial capital may indirectly affect the price of our loaf even more powerfully. When there is too much liquid capital moving through the global financial system, speculators start to bid-up the price of various assets, including all the ingredients in bread. This sort of speculation naturally contributes to rising fuel and grain prices.
The final ingredients come from nature: sunlight, oxygen, water, and nutritious soil, all in just the correct amounts and at just the right time. And there’s one more input that can’t be ignored, a different kind of contribution from nature: climate change, just now really kicking in, and increasingly the key destabilizing element in bringing that loaf of bread disastrously to market.
Marketing Disaster
When these ingredients mix in a way that sends the price of bread soaring, politics enters the picture. Consider this, for instance: the upheavals in
With that, protests began in
In
Against this backdrop, World Bank President Robert Zoellick fretted that the global food system was "one shock away from a full-fledged crisis." And if you want to trace that near full-fledged crisis back to its environmental roots, the place to look is climate change, the increasingly extreme and devastating weather being experienced across this planet.
When it comes to bread, it went like this: In the summer of 2010,
At the same time, massive flooding occurred in
And that’s when those climate-driven prices began to soar in
And recent months haven't brought much relief. Once again, significant, in some cases record, flooding has damaged crops in
And this, the experts tell us, is only the beginning. The price of our loaf of bread is forecast to increase by up to 90% over the next 20 years. That will mean yet more upheavals, more protest, greater desperation, heightened conflicts over water, increased migration, roiling ethnic and religious violence, banditry, civil war, and (if past history is any judge) possibly a raft of new interventions by imperial and possibly regional powers.
And how are we responding to this gathering crisis? Has there been a broad new international initiative focused on ensuring food security for the global poor -- that is to say, a stable, affordable price for our loaf of bread? You already know the sad answer to that question.
Instead, massive corporations like Glencore, the world’s largest commodity trading company, and the privately held and secretive Cargill, the world’s biggest trader of agricultural commodities, are moving to further consolidate their control of world grain markets and vertically integrate their global supply chains in a new form of food imperialism designed to profit off global misery. While bread triggered war and revolution in the
So what text should flash through our brains when reading our loaf of bread? A warning, obviously. But so far, it seems, a warning ignored.
Christian Parenti, author of the just-published Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (Nation Books), is a contributing editor at the Nation magazine, a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute, and a visiting scholar at the City University of New York. His articles have appeared in Fortune, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Mother Jones, among other places. He can be reached at Christian_parenti@yahoo.com. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Parenti discusses the origins of his latest book and how climate change contributes to global violence, click here, or download it to your iPod here.
Copyright 2012 Christian Parenti
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