The Food Crises and Political Instability in North Africa and the Middle East

TL;DR

This paper investigates how spikes in global food prices correlate with social unrest in North Africa and the Middle East, identifying a threshold that triggers protests and emphasizing the need for urgent action to prevent crises.

Contribution

It establishes a specific food price threshold linked to protests and analyzes the trend of rising food prices, highlighting the risk of increased social unrest without intervention.

Findings

Protests occur when food prices exceed a certain threshold.

Global food prices have been on an increasing trend.

High food prices are likely to cause persistent social disruption.

Abstract

Social unrest may reflect a variety of factors such as poverty, unemployment, and social injustice. Despite the many possible contributing factors, the timing of violent protests in North Africa and the Middle East in 2011 as well as earlier riots in 2008 coincides with large peaks in global food prices. We identify a specific food price threshold above which protests become likely. These observations suggest that protests may reflect not only long-standing political failings of governments, but also the sudden desperate straits of vulnerable populations. If food prices remain high, there is likely to be persistent and increasing global social disruption. Underlying the food price peaks we also find an ongoing trend of increasing prices. We extrapolate these trends and identify a crossing point to the domain of high impacts, even without price peaks, in 2012-2013. This implies that avoiding global food crises and associated social unrest requires rapid and concerted action.