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

It's Time To Start Taking This Global Food Riot Model Seriously | Motherboard:
An ominous twist is that corn producers in the U.S. are currently growing more corn than the market is demanding. That is, the cost of corn for consumers is hovering at the edge of riot levels, while the selling price of corn is too low for producers. This has happened before, during the Great Depression and immediately preceding the Dust Bowl. Farmers ripped up fields for wheat and corn crops as fast as possible to make ends meet as the market price for corn tumbled, while in the eastern U.S., the country starved under catastrophic unemployment.

What followed shortly afterward was the black sky hell of the Dust Bowl drought. And, at the moment, the United States’ corn producing regions remain in a drought second only to the Dust Bowl. It’s an epic and confusing mess of circumstances with that distorted echo of some of America’s worst years. A notable difference is that the world is much more global now, with our Dust Bowl resonating in even more vulnerable parts of the world. Unfortunately, Bar-Yam’s model is about to see many more tests.