[Vision2020] The Scary Hidden Stressor

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

------------------------------
March 2, 2013
The Scary Hidden Stressor By THOMAS L.
FRIEDMAN<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/thomaslfriedman/index.html>

IN her introduction to a compelling new study, “The Arab Spring and Climate
Change<http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/security/report/2013/02/28/54579/the-arab-spring-and-climate-change/>,”
released Thursday, the Princeton scholar Anne-Marie Slaughter notes that
crime shows often rely on the concept of a “stressor.” A stressor, she
explains, is a “sudden change in circumstances or environment that
interacts with a complicated psychological profile in a way that leads a
previously quiescent person to become violent.” The stressor is never the
only explanation for the crime, but it is inevitably an important factor in
a complex set of variables that lead to a disaster. “The Arab Spring and
Climate Change” doesn’t claim that climate change caused the recent wave of
Arab revolutions, but, taken together, the essays make a strong case that
the interplay between climate change, food prices (particularly wheat) and
politics is a hidden stressor that helped to fuel the revolutions and will
continue to make consolidating them into stable democracies much more
difficult.

Jointly produced by the Center for American Progress, the Stimson Center
and the Center for Climate and Security, this collection of essays opens
with the Oxford University geographer Troy Sternberg, who demonstrates how
in 2010-11, in tandem with the Arab awakenings, “a once-in-a-century winter
drought in China” — combined, at the same time, with record-breaking heat
waves or floods in other key wheat-growing countries (Ukraine, Russia,
Canada and Australia) — “contributed to global wheat shortages and
skyrocketing bread prices” in wheat-importing states, most of which are in
the Arab world.

Only a small fraction — 6 percent to 18 percent — of annual global wheat
production is traded across borders, explained Sternberg, “so any decrease
in world supply contributes to a sharp rise in wheat prices and has a
serious economic impact in countries such as Egypt, the largest wheat
importer in the world.”

The numbers tell the story: “Bread provides one-third of the caloric intake
in Egypt, a country where 38 percent of income is spent on food,” notes
Sternberg. “The doubling of global wheat prices — from $157/metric ton in
June 2010 to $326/metric ton in February 2011 — thus significantly impacted
the country’s food supply and availability.” Global food prices peaked at
an all-time high in March 2011, shortly after President Hosni Mubarak was
toppled in Egypt.

Consider this: The world’s top nine wheat-importers are in the Middle East:
“Seven had political protests resulting in civilian deaths in 2011,” said
Sternberg. “Households in the countries that experience political unrest
spend, on average, more than 35 percent of their income on food supplies,”
compared with less than 10 percent in developed countries.

Everything is linked: Chinese drought and Russian bushfires produced wheat
shortages leading to higher bread prices fueling protests in Tahrir Square.
Sternberg calls it the globalization of “hazard.”

Ditto in Syria and Libya. In their essay, the study’s co-editors, Francesco
Femia and Caitlin Werrell, note that from 2006 to 2011, up to 60 percent of
Syria’s land experienced the worst drought ever recorded there — at a time
when Syria’s population was exploding and its corrupt and inefficient
regime was proving incapable of managing the stress.

In 2009, they noted, the U.N. and other international agencies reported
that more than 800,000 Syrians lost their entire livelihoods as a result of
the great drought, which led to “a massive exodus of farmers, herders, and
agriculturally dependent rural families from the Syrian countryside to the
cities,” fueling unrest. The future does not look much brighter. “On a
scale of wetness conditions,” Femia and Werrell note, “ ‘where a reading of
-4 or below is considered extreme drought,’ a 2010 report by the National
Center for Atmospheric Research shows that Syria and its neighbors face
projected readings of -8 to -15 as a result of climatic changes in the next
25 years.” Similar trends, they note, are true for Libya, whose “primary
source of water is a finite cache of fossilized groundwater, which already
has been severely stressed while coastal aquifers have been progressively
invaded by seawater.”

Scientists like to say that, when it comes to climate change, we need to
manage what is unavoidable and avoid what is unmanageable. That requires
collective action globally to mitigate as much climate change as we can and
the building of resilient states locally to adapt to what we can’t
mitigate. The Arab world is doing the opposite. Arab states as a group are
the biggest lobbyists against efforts to reduce oil and fuel subsidies.
According to the International Monetary Fund, as much as one-fifth of some
Arab state budgets go to subsidizing gasoline and cooking fuel — more than
$200 billion a year in the Arab world as a whole — rather than into
spending on health and education. Meanwhile, locally, Arab states are being
made less resilient by the tribalism and sectarianism that are eating away
at their democratic revolutions.

As Sarah Johnstone and Jeffrey Mazo of the International Institute for
Strategic Studies conclude in their essay, “fledgling democracies with weak
institutions might find it even harder to deal with the root problems than
the regimes they replace, and they may be more vulnerable to further unrest
as a result.” Yikes.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20130303/d57c2304/attachment-0001.html>