While the causal intertwining of climate change, food security and political upheaval may not be new to human civilization, recent world events have thrust the topic back to the center of public consciousness with a vengeance.
Rising global food prices - which some believe are caused in part by a rash of severe weather - are at least partly credited with tipping the scales of popular ire that ultimately toppled autocratic regimes in both Tunisia and Egypt in the past several weeks.
As the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization's Food Price Index hit an historic peak in January, protests against swollen prices seemed to erupt in concert across disparate corners of the developing world, echoing the food riots of 2008.
Jordan, Algeria, Yemen, India, Mexico have all experienced turmoil. As recently as Thursday, food price protests forced Bolivian President Evo Morales to flee a public event.
Economists blame a variety of factors, including bad weather and rising demand, for wreaking havoc on crops and causing supply problems that led to the latest surge in prices.
But some are especially concerned with what they see as an alarming new pattern.
Writing in the New York Times last week, Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman argued that it's not just subsidized ethanol production, which utilizes corn, and greater meat consumption
"What we're getting now is a first taste of the disruption, economic and political, that we'll face in a warming world," he wrote, predicting more and worse unrest given our failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Bill Patzert, a climatologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says sure - but not yet.
"I'm a big global warming person, and I think climate change in the next century will be the largest determinant of human civilization," he said.
"(But) this is not global warming, not yet. It definitely will be in the next century. The change in global temperatures has been about one degree over the last century," he said, adding, "We've had some pretty extreme weather here, but not unprecedented droughts and floods."
While Patzert acknowledges floods and fires in Australia, droughts in China and Russia's droughts and heat wave precipitated the recent wheat crisis; he calls them "definitely extreme, but not record-breaking or unprecedented."
"Krugman had some good points...The only thing I would say is it's a preview of coming attractions not a first taste yet,"he said.
In this Jan. 31, 2011 file photo, consumers shop at the Hiber Market in the outskirts of Cairo, Egypt. The protests that have engulfed Cairo since Jan. 25 shuttered businesses, forced factories to stop operating closed banks and the stock exchange and limited suppliers' ability to restock store shelves. The price of some basic goods has spiked over 50 percent and other products have started to disappear from shelves. The shortages and price increases add to the economic pinch that many Egyptians involved in the protests said were among the key catalysts for joining the demonstrations. But they have also fueled anger both at the government and the protesters, pitting Egyptian against Egyptian. (AP Photo/Khalil Hamra, File).
For those watching the effects on the ground, the discrepancy may not really matter.
Whatever you think about climate change, says Calestous Juma, a professor of development at Harvard and director of the school's Science, Technology and Globalization Project, the effects are playing out now.
"Agriculture is likely the sector to be affected almost immediately by climate change," said Juma, also a former executive secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and author of the book, "The New Harvest."
"This is an area where you don't have to agree whether it's caused by human behavior or not - there's ample evidence (of) ecological destruction worldwide. What's important is to start thinking about the evidence on the ground."
The connection between food security and climate change is on world leaders' minds and part of intelligence and military discourse - both in developing countries and beyond, said Juma.
“Climate change starts to affect agriculture, which would have bigger consequences beyond food security, disrupting the economy itself. This is the connection African leaders are making," he said, pointing to recent clashes in Tanzania - "a very peaceful country" - between farmers and herders forced to migrate by ecological conditions.
"So it's really an example of a security issue driven by drought."
Most African countries have gone through a 20-year period of divestment in agriculture and rural development, leading to dependency on food aid and extreme urbanization rates, Juma points out that other developing countries, like Egypt, are following a slightly different route.
"Egypt is the biggest importer of wheat and it's not going to produce its own. If its economy is not performing well, or if prices go up and the country starts to liberalize and income levels are not going up, you end up with disparities and concerns, which can trigger unrest."
Both paths end at about the same place, he said.
Much of the recent discourse over climate change and food security points to overpopulation as another culprit in a world of dwindling resources and limited space.
Patzert blames overpopulation and supply and demand in a flat economy for interfering with our capacity to cope with "not unprecedented" extreme weather. The main problem, he said, is that the earth is "hot, flat and crowded."
Eric B. Ross, a lecturer in anthropology and international development at the George Washington University and author of "The Malthus Factor: Poverty, Politics and Population in Capitalist Development," suggests the focus on population boom is often misplaced.
"If you take the `best' examples of population pressure causing food scarcity - the Irish potato famine, the Bengal famine of 1943 - it still turns out that the scarcity was not induced by population overwhelming food supplies, but by market (failures)," Ross said. "In the end, what distorts the relationship of population to food supply is the way food markets are dominated by profit rather than need."
Anticipating continuing unrest, a British government report released last week threw its weight behind genetically modified crops as a way out of a broken global food system already affected by climate change and threatened by rising populations.
As for recent calls to answer population growth with more genetically modified crops, Ross believes the choice between bioengineering and population control is a false one. In his opinion, the latter ignores real sources of scarcity, while the former marginalizes subsistence farmers and displaces rural peoples while producing measurably poorer and less sustainable food.
Juma disagrees in part, noting that recent evidence tells us genetically modified plants can in fact be beneficial for the environment.
Looking ahead, Juma sees the world embracing more diverse agricultural practices. He also sees food anxieties and shortages as a continued catalyst in countries where people are living in the margins.
"Food can be a trigger, because it's something you consume three times a day. Food is a very important factor here in that if people don't have food or have the perception of scarcity, they become a lot more anxious. So anything else can trigger it," he said.
"For the very poor economies, I think food will become an important trigger - a galvanizing mechanism for people to express their views about overall conditions of poverty."
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