Food crisis creates an opening for Muslim fundamentalists

       Expanding the ideas in my last post is this article in the Los Angeles Times:

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-food18-2008may18,0,4822291,full.story

       That fact that the poor can't feed their families in Jordan is scary, but not nearly as scary as the fact that the Jordanian government can't feed its soldiers:

Many Jordanians say members of the army, the pillar of the regime, are being struck hardest by the crisis, unable to make ends meet on salaries of less than $10 per day.

'When you talk to the police officers and the army they're more and more complaining about everything,' said Mohammed Masri, an analyst at the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan.

Hadid, the tribal leader, recently received reports of security forces selling weapons.

'In the days to come, Al Qaeda won't need to bring weapons and bombs from outside Jordan,' Hadid said. 'They'll get it from here. The circumstances will allow Al Qaeda to penetrate the security apparatus.'

An unhappy army means a country ripe for a coup, which would be a disaster for Jordan, the Middle East as a whole, and the United States. King Abdullah II, a monarch though he may be, has been a force of modernization, education, economic growth and democracy in Jordan. The alternative, whether an Islamic government or a military dictatorship, would reverse 30 years of progress and threaten the peace between Jordan and Israel.
       Another unsettling undercurrent to this story is the fact that the hungry are blaming the United States. Being the world's only superpower, the folks in 2nd and 3rd world countries think that we can do whatever we want. We put men on the moon right? Surely we control the flow of food to Jordan. Naturally this means that when there's not enough bread, it's because the great leader of the United States has decided to punish Jordanians.
       Many Iraqis feel the same way. Five years after the invasion, many villages still don't have power and sewers. Unable to understand that even the great USA can't rebuild a whole country in five years, they think we're doing it intentionally and they're pissed. It seems that the USA has replaced Israel as the Arabs' default scapegoat.

Food price crisis bites in Egypt

The last month has been witness to an increasingly disturbing phenomenon in the Middle East and North Africa: civilian riots over the rising cost of food. Riots have occurred in Egypt, The UAE, Yemen, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia in what appears to be a region-wide problem. It is Egypt that so far has been most affected.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7381766.stm

What’s occurring in Egypt is the result of population pressure on a land with few natural resources. Like the rest of the Middle East, Egypt had little or no modern medicine until its colonization by European powers after World War I. With the colonizers came vaccines for small pox and other diseases, as well as investments in basic infrastructure that increased dramatically the probability of Egyptians living past childhood.
At the same time, Arab and Muslim countries have some of the highest birth rates in the world. Much of the reason for this is religious and cultural, but there’s also a practical reason. In countries with little or no social security, the only way one can be sure of being taken care of in old age is to have as many children as possible to increase the probability that some will prosper and take care of mom and pop.
The result in Egypt and the rest of the Middle East is a sort of population time bomb. Looking at a graph of Egypt’s population, one can see the steady rise that took it from 20,000,000 in 1950 to 80,000,000 currently. Now the Nile Valley peasants can no longer feed the 12,000,000 people who live in Cairo. Exacerbating the situation, most of the cities that house this ballooning population have sprawled unchecked over the most productive farmland. Egypt, which once grew enough grain to literally feed the entire ancient world, is now a food importer, with much of the grain that feeds its citizens coming from the United States.

Of course they’re not alone:

“The FAO estimates the region’s cereals import bill will hit $22.6bn this year (£11.4bn, €14.5bn), a 40 per cent increase on 2007. Since 2000, it has jumped almost 170 per cent. The rising bill is the latest signal of the looming food crisis hanging over the Middle East and North Africa, the region of the world most dependent on imports of food staples.” ( http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d69a26e2-1bc2-11dd-9e58-0000779fd2ac.html)

Worldwide, the poor are bearing the brunt of the suffering. If a family spends 75% of its income on food and the cost of food rises 25%, it is immediately thrust into destitution. With destitution comes instability. The hungry, ignorant of the macroeconomics that led to their plight, start to point fingers at the ruling powers. Accusations fly, conspiracy theories run rife and the masses, unable to place the blame on their over-productive wombs, demand change. All of the sudden, ideologies like Islamism and communism appear attractive and the whole country erupts like a powder keg into civil war.
My fear is that the alternatives are few. Higher prices will eventually bring more investment in agriculture in places like India and Russia which will boost output and keep prices in check. Egypt has less to gain from investment, however, because it has no more land on which to farm. The income it receives from petroleum exports, tourism and the Suez Canal is not enough to subsidize the whole country. With no manufacturing base to speak of and few other natural resources, it seems that Egypt will be forced to survive as a charity, relying on handouts because it has nothing to trade in return.
The thought of an unstable Egypt, teetering on the brink of civil war, with only UN food shipments to keep it afloat, is enough to scare the wits out of anyone. Birth control is the only solution I see, but I can guarantee that a China-like solution where the powers-that-be can mandate how many kids you can have will not take hold there as easily as it did in China. It’s un-Islamic, and I doubt any regime could enforce it.

Sheik Mohammed's Billion-Dollar Question

Just in case there's any doubt about the decadent things you can do when you're filthy-rich:

http://www.slate.com/id/2190272/

The weird thing is, Dubai actually only makes about 5% of its money from oil. Most of the ducats the sheikh spends on equines come from shipping, tourism and finance. It just goes to show that if the rest of the mega-ultra-rich oil sheikhs that rule the Persian Gulf would pull their heads out of the sand and build cities that people actually want to visit, they might stand a chance of not fading into oblivion when the oil dries up.
The cities that is. The folks over there are so rich by now that even after the oil they'll still be important, what with them owning much of the world. I imagine that if their cities are still uninspiring shit holes when the gold rush ends, they'll just pick up and move, probably with most of their country in tow.
But if they manage to follow Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum's example and diversify their economies, then maybe Kuwait City and Riyadh and the rest of the Persian Gulf Coast will end up more than just a home for sand fleas. More to come on that for sure.