[ExI] Hunger causes riots - not war

BillK pharos at gmail.com
Tue Sep 11 09:25:05 UTC 2012


What’s the number one reason we riot? The plausible, justifiable
motivations of trampled-upon humanfolk to fight back are many—poverty,
oppression, disenfranchisement, etc—but the big one is more primal
than any of the above. It’s hunger, plain and simple. If there’s a
single factor that reliably sparks social unrest, it’s food becoming
too scarce or too expensive. So argues a group of complex systems
theorists in Cambridge, and it makes sense.

<http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/9/10/we-are-now-one-year-away-from-global-riots-complex-systems-theorists-say>

“Recent droughts in the mid-western United States threaten to cause
global catastrophe,” Yaneer Bar-Yam, one of the authors of the report,
recently told Al Jazeera. “When people are unable to feed themselves
and their families, widespread social disruption occurs. We are on the
verge of another crisis, the third in five years, and likely to be the
worst yet, capable of causing new food riots and turmoil on a par with
the Arab Spring.”


BillK




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