Reading the World In a Loaf of Bread 

Soaring Food Prices, Wild Weather, Upheaval, and a Planetful of Trouble 

By Christian Parenti

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175419/tomgram%
3A_christian_parenti%2C_staff_of_life%2C_bread_of_death/#
more

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 Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, to Nairobi, Kenya, and
most disturbingly three new wars began in Libya, Yemen,
and Syria. Even on Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, Bedouin tribes
are now in revolt against the country's interim government
and manning their own armed roadblocks.

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 Egypt lay at the
heart of the Arab Spring.  Egypt is also the world's
single largest wheat importer, followed closely by Algeria
and Morocco. Keep in mind as well that the Arab Spring
started in Tunisia when rising food prices, high
unemployment, and a widening gap between rich and poor
triggered deadly riots and finally the flight of the
country's autocratic ruler Zine Ben Ali. His last act was
a vow to reduce the price of sugar, milk, and bread -- and
it was too little too late.

With that, protests began in Egypt and the Algerian
government ordered increased wheat imports to stave off
growing unrest over food prices.  As global wheat prices
surged by 70% between June and December 2010, bread
consumption in Egypt started to decline under what
economists termed "price rationing." And that price kept
rising all through the spring of 2011.  By June, wheat
cost 83% more than it had a year before. During the same
time frame, corn prices surged by a staggering 91%.  Egypt
is the world's fourth largest corn importer. When not used
to make bread, corn is often employed as a food additive
and to feed poultry and livestock. Algeria, Syria,
Morocco, and Saudi Arabia are among the top 15 corn
importers. As those wheat and corn prices surged, it was
not just the standard of living of the Egyptian poor that
was threatened, but their very lives as climate-change
driven food prices triggered political violence.

In Egypt, food is a volatile political issue. After all,
one in five Egyptians live on less than $1 a day and the
government provides subsidized bread to 14.2 million
people in a population of 83 million. Last year, overall
food-price inflation in Egypt was running at more than
20%. This had an instant and devastating impact on
Egyptian families, who spend on average 40% of their often
exceedingly meager monthly incomes simply feeding
themselves.

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, Russia, one of the world's leading wheat
exporters, suffered its worst drought in 100 years. Known
as the Black Sea Drought, this extreme weather triggered
fires that burnt down vast swathes of Russian forests,
bleached farmlands, and damaged the country's breadbasket
wheat crop so badly that its leaders (urged on by western
grain speculators) imposed a year-long ban on wheat
exports.  As Russia is among the top four wheat exporters
in any year, this caused prices to surge upward.

At the same time, massive flooding occurred in Australia,
another significant wheat exporter, while excessive rains
in the American Midwest and Canada damaged corn
production. Freakishly massive flooding in Pakistan, which
put some 20% of that country under water, also spooked
markets and spurred on the speculators.

And that's when those climate-driven prices began to soar
in Egypt.  The ensuing crisis, triggered in part by that
rise in the price of our loaf of bread, led to upheaval
and finally the fall of the country's reigning autocrat
Hosni Mubarak.  Tunisia and Egypt helped trigger a crisis
that led to an incipient civil war and then western
intervention in neighboring Libya, which meant most of
that country's production of 1.4 million barrels of oil a
day went off-line. That, in turn, caused the price of
crude oil to surge, at its height hitting $125 a barrel,
which set off yet more speculation in food markets,
further driving up grain prices.

And recent months haven't brought much relief.  Once
again, significant, in some cases record, flooding has
damaged crops in Canada, the United States, and Australia.
Meanwhile, an unexpected spring drought in northern Europe
has hurt grain crops as well. The global food system is
visibly straining, if not snapping, under the intense
pressure of rising demand, rising energy prices, growing
water shortages, and most of all the onset of climate
chaos.

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
Middle East, Glencore made windfall profits on the surge
in grain prices. And the more expensive our loaf of bread
becomes the more money firms like Glencore and Cargill
stand to make. Consider that just about the worst possible
form of "adaptation" to the climate crisis.

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.

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