Inflation and Rising Food Prices Lead to Riots in Haiti, Cairo, Next, Revolution?

There is no faster way to make someone angry than to reach into their wallet. To add fuel to the fire, steal the money that would have paid for their dinner, and catastrophe ensues.

A downright frightening facet of the global economic downturn is rising inflation. Some people—wealthy, the middle class in industrialized countries—can deal with the spike in the price, say, of rice. However, most of the world, lest it be forgotten that more than ten billion live on less than $2 a day, cannot simply buy a 36-inch instead of a 42-inch flatscreen television to balance the budget. The proof?

Food riots.

In the streets of Haiti, the most destitute state in the Americas, exactly such a disaster is taking place right now. In Cairo, where corruption had already mangled the bread industry, rising food prices have set off unrest there as well. Both countries are desperately poor; while there are nice hotels in Cairo, more than 74 million Egyptians live on less than $1 a day. People have also gone from wits end to violence in Cameroon and Cote d'Ivoire. Protests have hit Uzbekistan, Yemen, Bolivia and Indonesia.

The venerable World Food Programme of the United Nations, which feeds more than 70 million people every day, is now starved for cash and suppliers. World Bank President Robert Zoellick, after asking rich countries to go above and beyond for another $500 for WFP, said, "While many worry about filling their gas tanks, many others around the world are struggling to fill their stomachs."

Remember that unreasonable bread prices was an instigator of the French Revolution. From "A Popular History of France," by Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot, "We could see the French flying over the roads, across fields and through hedges, in such numbers that the sight must have been seen to be believed.  There were in the outskirts of our town and in the neighboring villages, so vast a multitude of knights and men-at-arms tormented with hunger, that it was a matter horrible to see. They gave their arms to get bread."

A riot of desperation may unsettle Port-au-Prince, and Haitians are targeting President René Préval. From the Associated Press, "We heard the speech, but the speech is empty," said student protest organizer Herve Saintiles, 37. "We are going to hold the president responsible for all these problems." Holding officials responsible is one thing, revolution is quite another.

Perhaps the scarcity of resources, as a Malthusian demand of people around the world, has now become one of the defining characteristics of this globalized planet, one that stands in stark contrast to the French aristocracy two centuries ago.

And if revolution came in Cairo, in Port-au-Prince, or in Yaoundé, would we even want to see where it was headed?

UPDATE: Hait's Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis has resigned; Zoellick has said that 33 countries are at risk; Wall Street Journal front page: biofuels "appalling."

[Photo of the 18th-Century France from Gutenberg.]

Report: Annan's Room Bugged, 100 Million Affected by Kenyan Violence

[At right: the Rift Valley in Kenya.]

Until the recently disputed elections and ensuring street violence, Kenya held special status on the African continent. The vital role it played in providing stability is all the more evident now that Nairobi and the Rift Valley are embroiled in violent political conflict.

Former Secretary-General Kofi Annan has so far headed the peace negotiations, but a report from South Africa's Independent Newspapers claims that the ranking diplomat's hotel room has been bugged and the peace talks are now "in tatters." Annan's security aides uncovered the spy device. No word on who might have planted it.

At the same time, a substantial report from IRIN explains that, because of the disruptions in Nairobi, more than 100 million people—that is a third of the population of the entire US—could be affected in Sudan, Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Considering the thin lifelines staving off conflict in some of these places, that the Rift Valley makes up a 6,000-kilometer fissure in the earth's crust may soon serve as a chilling metaphor.

From the IRIN report:

Southern Sudan, Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have experienced shortages of fuel and other essential supplies because of insecurity along the Kenyan section of the Northern Corridor, one of the most important transport routes in Africa. It runs from the Kenyan port of Mombasa westwards through Uganda and the Great Lakes.

Among aid agencies, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) faces the greatest challenge, feeding seven million vulnerable people in East Africa and the Great Lakes.

"WFP is extremely concerned because Kenya is not just supplying Kenya. It's supplying much of east and central Africa, both with commercial trade and food and also humanitarian assistance. It's a very worrying problem," WFP spokesman Peter Smerdon told IRIN.

"We need to feed seven million people every month and that includes 250,000 [internally displaced by the post-election violence] in Kenya on top of our normal caseload. We need a continuous supply line.

"If the roads are closed for a week or two weeks, then we get into real problems. We might have to start postponing food distributions. You could see people [going] hungry if the road network is knocked out for weeks," he said.

Covering more than 1,400km, the Northern Corridor is the largest in Africa, used by 4,000 light vehicles, 1,250 trucks and 400 buses per day. It carries more than 10 million tonnes of cargo a year.

WFP moves more than 1,000 tonnes of food out of Mombasa every day of the year, according to Alistair Cook, the logistics co-ordinator. "WFP has to keep the corridor in operation or else we will lose hundreds of thousands of refugees through starvation," he said.

Babies Everywhere in Africa, Meanwhile Global Population Leveling in Developed World

Get knocked up and win a Hummer! Talk about a national holiday. So went the “family contact day” earlier this month in the central Russian province of Ulyanovsk, where governor Sergei Morozov urged families to take the day off from work and do their best to, ahem, get lucky. In an effort to grow the Russian population, incentives go beyond the day off and pure pleasure of procreation: families who find themselves visited by a stork exactly nine months later on June 12, Russia’s national day, will be awarded home appliances, a sport-utility vehicle or even a new house.

This third annual Russian “sex day” seems to buck the common conception that, if anything, the earth suffers from too many human inhabitants. If you look at a graph of population growth, it would seem as much. From about the birth of Christ to the year 1800, there were less than a billion people. Then the graph shoots straight up, as the world population increased sixfold in two hundred years.

For a long time, common understanding dictated that overpopulation was a serious threat to the survival of the species. Such is still a perilous reality in countries like China and India who, each with more than a billion people, face poverty crises and drastic shortages of essential resources, namely water. Only, recent reports are hinting that the global baby boom may be coming to an end. Russia, in particular, is losing population at a rapid rate, hence the holiday.

Already, in an increasing number of countries, women are having babies at a rate that won’t keep populations even at its current levels. The United Nations, who has been tracking this story since 1951, estimates that by mid-century there will be 9.2 billion people. That’s an increase of almost 3 billion. For some perspective, that’s more people than even existed 50 years ago.

The mass of those billions of babies soon to be born, on the whole, will be from developing countries. Currently, the world’s highest fertility rates are in some of the world’s poorest areas. On the whole, women in Uganda, Angola, Chad, East Timor, Liberia, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Afghanistan are giving birth to seven children over the course of their child-bearing years. (See here for a complete list.)

Growth in countries like the United States, Europe, and Japan, has already leveled off. In other words, the developed world is getting old. Unfortunately there’s no Viagra prescription that is going to solve this one. Hummers, as incentives, may help, but you have to wonder about the wealthy world—all work and no babies?

(Map of world fertility rates from Wikipedia; click to enlarge.)

Fat Americans, Starving Africans, and the Farm Subsidies That Love Them

US farm subsidies may win the award for the kind of story that, on face, is immensely boring, yet it is a story with severely devastating impacts across the globe. We're in the middle of a ten-year stretch, during which time the US government will hand out at least $171 billion, subsidizing big American farmers and spurring the overproduction of wheat, corn and the like.

From the Heritage Foundation, "Most of their enormous $171 billion cost would subsidize highly profitable Fortune 500 companies, agribusinesses, and celebrity 'hobby farmers' and help fund their purchases of small family farms, and the average American family would be left paying $4,400 in taxes and inflated food prices to benefit millionaires--unless Congress or President George W. Bush finally puts an end to this counterproductive waste of taxpayer dollars."

And then there are the Africans.

So not only are Americans paying out of their own pocket twice, first as taxpayers and then second as consumers at the grocery store, but then the US turns around to do its good deeds around the world, of which it does quite a bit with international aid, and the farm subsidies bear their bushels of rotten fruit once again. Inflated prices from American farmers hurt the world economy; farmers in the developing world can't sell their crops at market prices because market prices have been manipulated (remember the infusion of $171 billion?).

On top of messing with the market, the US regularly delivers giant sacks of grains to areas of the world like Darfur and the Congo, only, the wheat it delivers was grown in the US with the subsidies, so it's a trifecta: the delivery of aid itself is further depressing the local economies of developing countries.

So it was shocking to see CARE, a major humanitarian organization fighting global poverty, boycott the aid of the US. CARE turned down $45 million worth of wheat, arguing that its distribution harms local farmers. The Independent even wrote that the aid was "wrecking" Africa.

Lastly, the 2007 US Farm Bill, which is currently being debated in Congress and will be in effect for five years, looks like it will pass, with little change in policy.

The Inquirer's World Water Crisis Watch

The Inquirer is now fixing its eyes on what could be the next truly global humanitarian crisis: the fight for clean water.

Only a fraction of the world's water is fresh (or, not salty), and already a billion people a day lack adequate resources for drinking and bathing.

As an introduction, click on the image to work with an informative interactive map put together by the BBC which indicates a number of flashpoints around the world where catastrophe looms.

Western Medicine Reaping What It Has Sowed in Sub-Saharan Africa

Not even 2% of the world's doctor's practice in sub-Saharan Africa. So, then, why is it that Africans, who are in desperate need of medical care and attention, distrust Western medicine that is, ostensibly, coming to their side?

Harriet Washington chronicles several injustices that Western medicine has reaped throughout the continent and makes clear that these tragic injustices--from biological weapons in South Africa to the tens of thousands infected with HIV via reused and contaminated needles--become highly publicized across the continent. Thus, a backlash against Western medicine. Washington:

Certainly, the vast majority of beneficent Western medical workers in Africa are to be thanked, not censured. But the canon of "silence equals death" applies here: We are ignoring a responsibility to defend the mass of innocent Western doctors against the belief that they are not treating disease, but intentionally spreading it. We should approach Africans' suspicions with respect, realizing that they are born of the acts of a few monsters and of the deadly constraints on medical care in difficult conditions. By continuing to dismiss their reasonable fears, we raise the risk of even more needless illness and death.