It's Time To Start Taking This Global Food Riot Model Very Seriously

Source: Motherboard

You should already know the name Yaneer Bar-Yam. He’s the founding president of the New England Complex Systems Institute and made news for a 2011 paper tying global food prices to 2008 and 2011 riot outbreaks in Africa, and the general theory that above a certain benchmark food price, the conditions for rioting become prime. It’s not a strict cause and effect relationship—if value x, then riots—simply an observation that the probability of riots spikes at a certain point. Other things, like, say, Mohamed Bouazizi setting himself on fire, might be the actual trigger, but day-to-day survival as it pertains to food is what allows the gun to fire.
Bar-Yam’s model has another “success,” according to a paper posted on the arVix pre-print server last week. Rioting that occurred last year during a platinum miner’s strike in South Africa—in which 34 strikers were killed by government forces—coincided neatly with a spike in the global price of maize. Stagnant wages matched with spiking food costs yields unrest. It matches well with a similar spike in 2008 that resulted in another series of riots in the country.
The graph is below is limited to South Africa and fairly self-explanatory:
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