The Hunger Wars in Our Future
Heat, Drought, Rising Food Costs, and Global Unrest

By Michael T. Klare
Tom Dispatch
August 7, 2012
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175579/tomgram%3A_michael_klare%2C_post-apocalyptic_fantasy_becomes_everyday_reality

The Great Drought of 2012 has yet to come to an end, but
we already know that its consequences will be severe.
With more than one-half of America's counties designated
as drought disaster areas, the 2012 harvest of corn,
soybeans, and other food staples is guaranteed to fall
far short of predictions. This, in turn, will boost food
prices domestically and abroad, causing increased misery
for farmers and low-income Americans and far greater
hardship for poor people in countries that rely on
imported U.S. grains.

This, however, is just the beginning of the likely
consequences: if history is any guide, rising food
prices of this sort will also lead to widespread social
unrest and violent conflict.

Food -- affordable food -- is essential to human
survival and well-being. Take that away, and people
become anxious, desperate, and angry. In the United
States, food represents only about 13% of the average
household budget, a relatively small share, so a boost
in food prices in 2013 will probably not prove overly
taxing for most middle- and upper-income families. It
could, however, produce considerable hardship for poor
and unemployed Americans with limited resources. "You
are talking about a real bite out of family budgets,"
commented Ernie Gross, an agricultural economist at
Omaha's Creighton University. This could add to the
discontent already evident in depressed and high-
unemployment areas, perhaps prompting an intensified
backlash against incumbent politicians and other forms
of dissent and unrest.

It is in the international arena, however, that the
Great Drought is likely to have its most devastating
effects. Because so many nations depend on grain imports
from the U.S. to supplement their own harvests, and
because intense drought and floods are damaging crops
elsewhere as well, food supplies are expected to shrink
and prices to rise across the planet. "What happens to
the U.S. supply has immense impact around the world,"
says Robert Thompson, a food expert at the Chicago
Council on Global Affairs. As the crops most affected by
the drought, corn and soybeans, disappear from world
markets, he noted, the price of all grains, including
wheat, is likely to soar, causing immense hardship to
those who already have trouble affording enough food to
feed their families.

The Hunger Games, 2007-2011

What happens next is, of course, impossible to predict,
but if the recent past is any guide, it could turn ugly.
In 2007-2008, when rice, corn, and wheat experienced
prices hikes of 100% or more, sharply higher prices --
especially for bread -- sparked "food riots" in more
than two dozen countries, including Bangladesh,
Cameroon, Egypt, Haiti, Indonesia, Senegal, and Yemen.
In Haiti, the rioting became so violent and public
confidence in the government's ability to address the
problem dropped so precipitously that the Haitian Senate
voted to oust the country's prime minister,
Jacques-Édouard Alexis. In other countries, angry
protestors clashed with army and police forces, leaving
scores dead.

Those price increases of 2007-2008 were largely
attributed to the soaring cost of oil, which made food
production more expensive. (Oil's use is widespread in
farming operations, irrigation, food delivery, and
pesticide manufacture.) At the same time, increasing
amounts of cropland worldwide were being diverted from
food crops to the cultivation of plants used in making
biofuels.

The next price spike in 2010-11 was, however, closely
associated with climate change. An intense drought
gripped much of eastern Russia during the summer of
2010, reducing the wheat harvest in that breadbasket
region by one-fifth and prompting Moscow to ban all
wheat exports. Drought also hurt China's grain harvest,
while intense flooding destroyed much of Australia's
wheat crop. Together with other extreme-weather-related
effects, these disasters sent wheat prices soaring by
more than 50% and the price of most food staples by 32%.

Once again, a surge in food prices resulted in
widespread social unrest, this time concentrated in
North Africa and the Middle East. The earliest protests
arose over the cost of staples in Algeria and then
Tunisia, where -- no coincidence -- the precipitating
event was a young food vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, setting
himself on fire to protest government harassment. Anger
over rising food and fuel prices combined with long-
simmering resentments about government repression and
corruption sparked what became known as the Arab Spring.
The rising cost of basic staples, especially a loaf of
bread, was also a cause of unrest in Egypt, Jordan, and
Sudan. Other factors, notably anger at entrenched
autocratic regimes, may have proved more powerful in
those places, but as the author of Tropic of Chaos,
Christian Parenti, wrote, "The initial trouble was
traceable, at least in part, to the price of that loaf
of bread."

As for the current drought, analysts are already warning
of instability in Africa, where corn is a major staple,
and of increased popular unrest in China, where food
prices are expected to rise at a time of growing
hardship for that country's vast pool of low-income,
migratory workers and poor peasants. Higher food prices
in the U.S. and China could also lead to reduced
consumer spending on other goods, further contributing
to the slowdown in the global economy and producing yet
more worldwide misery, with unpredictable social
consequences.

The Hunger Games, 2012-??

If this was just one bad harvest, occurring in only one
country, the world would undoubtedly absorb the ensuing
hardship and expect to bounce back in the years to come.
Unfortunately, it's becoming evident that the Great
Drought of 2012 is not a one-off event in a single
heartland nation, but rather an inevitable consequence
of global warming which is only going to intensify. As
a result, we can expect not just more bad years of
extreme heat, but worse years, hotter and more often,
and not just in the United States, but globally for the
indefinite future.

Until recently, most scientists were reluctant to blame
particular storms or droughts on global warming. Now,
however, a growing number of scientists believe that
such links can be demonstrated in certain cases. In one
recent study focused on extreme weather events in 2011,
for instance, climate specialists at the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Great
Britain's National Weather Service concluded that human-
induced climate change has made intense heat waves of
the kind experienced in Texas in 2011 more likely than
ever before. Published in the Bulletin of the American
Meteorological Society, it reported that global warming
had ensured that the incidence of that Texas heat wave
was 20 times more likely than it would have been in
1960; similarly, abnormally warm temperatures like those
experienced in Britain last November were said to be 62
times as likely because of global warming.

It is still too early to apply the methodology used by
these scientists to calculating the effect of global
warming on the heat waves of 2012, which are proving to
be far more severe, but we can assume the level of
correlation will be high. And what can we expect in the
future, as the warming gains momentum?

When we think about climate change (if we think about it
at all), we envision rising temperatures, prolonged
droughts, freakish storms, hellish wildfires, and rising
sea levels. Among other things, this will result in
damaged infrastructure and diminished food supplies.
These are, of course, manifestations of warming in the
physical world, not the social world we all inhabit and
rely on for so many aspects of our daily well-being and
survival. The purely physical effects of climate change
will, no doubt, prove catastrophic. But the social
effects including, somewhere down the line, food riots,
mass starvation, state collapse, mass migrations, and
conflicts of every sort, up to and including full-scale
war, could prove even more disruptive and deadly.

In her immensely successful young-adult novel The Hunger
Games (and the movie that followed), Suzanne Collins
riveted millions with a portrait of a dystopian,
resource-scarce, post-apocalyptic future where once-
rebellious "districts" in an impoverished North America
must supply two teenagers each year for a series of
televised gladiatorial games that end in death for all
but one of the youthful contestants. These "hunger
games" are intended as recompense for the damage
inflicted on the victorious capital of Panem by the
rebellious districts during an insurrection. Without
specifically mentioning global warming, Collins makes it
clear that climate change was significantly responsible
for the hunger that shadows the North American continent
in this future era. Hence, as the gladiatorial
contestants are about to be selected, the mayor of
District 12's principal city describes "the disasters,
the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching
seas that swallowed up so much of the land [and] the
brutal war for what little sustenance remained."

In this, Collins was prescient, even if her specific
vision of the violence on which such a world might be
organized is fantasy. While we may never see her version
of those hunger games, do not doubt that some version of
them will come into existence -- that, in fact, hunger
wars of many sorts will fill our future. These could
include any combination or permutation of the deadly
riots that led to the 2008 collapse of Haiti's
government, the pitched battles between massed
protesters and security forces that engulfed parts of
Cairo as the Arab Spring developed, the ethnic struggles
over disputed croplands and water sources that have made
Darfur a recurring headline of horror in our world, or
the inequitable distribution of agricultural land that
continues to fuel the insurgency of the Maoist-inspired
Naxalites of India.

Combine such conflicts with another likelihood: that
persistent drought and hunger will force millions of
people to abandon their traditional lands and flee to
the squalor of shantytowns and expanding slums
surrounding large cities, sparking hostility from those
already living there. One such eruption, with grisly
results, occurred in Johannesburg's shantytowns in 2008
when desperately poor and hungry migrants from Malawi
and Zimbabwe were set upon, beaten, and in some cases
burned to death by poor South Africans. One terrified
Zimbabwean, cowering in a police station from the raging
mobs, said she fled her country because "there is no
work and no food." And count on something else: millions
more in the coming decades, pressed by disasters ranging
from drought and flood to rising sea levels, will try to
migrate to other countries, provoking even greater
hostility. And that hardly begins to exhaust the
possibilities that lie in our hunger-games future.

At this point, the focus is understandably on the
immediate consequences of the still ongoing Great
Drought: dying crops, shrunken harvests, and rising food
prices. But keep an eye out for the social and political
effects that undoubtedly won't begin to show up here or
globally until later this year or 2013. Better than any
academic study, these will offer us a hint of what we
can expect in the coming decades from a hunger-games
world of rising temperatures, persistent droughts,
recurring food shortages, and billions of famished,
desperate people.

Michael Klare is a professor of peace and world security
studies at Hampshire College, a TomDispatch regular, and
the author, most recently, of The Race for What's Left
(Metropolitan Books). A documentary movie based on his
book Blood and Oil can be previewed and ordered at
www.bloodandoilmovie.com. You can follow Klare on
Facebook by clicking here.

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Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare,
2001-2050.

Copyright 2012 Michael T. Klare

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