This post follows up the discussion
here earlier this week about
uncertainties in measurements of food security. The
graph above comes from The Economist and the accompanying text offers a rather subtle corrective to conventional wisdom (such as
this and
this and
this):
[F]ood prices in local currency soared in the year to December 2010 in countries like El Salvador, Venezuela, Iran and Morocco. Food was cheaper in December 2010 than a year earlier in places like India, Egypt and Ghana.
So while food prices were much higher in early 2011 than 2005, it seems difficult to argue that they were a proximate cause of the unrest and revolution in Egypt, if food prices were actually lower than a year earlier (see figure above). This perspective was actually reported at the time, such as
by the WSJ:
In Egypt, food is a highly political issue. The world’s biggest wheat importer, where one in five people lives on less than $1 a day, provides subsidized bread for 14.2 million people.
United Nations figures showing world prices pushed above their highs of three years ago in December has sparked a wave of unease throughout the heavily import-reliant region as governments looked to stave off domestic inflation.
Yet Daniel Williams, a worker for Human Rights watch who has been living in Egypt for seven years, said food inflation has played only a minor role in the current discontent. “For someone poor trying to feed a family of four children here has always been difficult,” he said.
“If you look at who’s actually out there it’s all segments of society. The bloggers, the people who are driving this, they are mainly middle-class kids. In middle-class neighborhoods you sense people are holding their breath in the way you don’t in the poorer neighborhoods.”
Liliana Balbi, senior economist at the Food and Agriculture Organization, agreed. “Definitely this unrest is not related to soaring food prices in general”
As the saying goes, conventional wisdom is often neither.
