Forget Oil: What about rice?

The recent discussion on the price of rice skyrocketing has a lot to do with globalization. Rice is as staple that half of the world relies on making the demand for it very inelastic. Nathan Childs, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s resident rice expert, said that traditionally, the bulk of the world’s rice was eaten 60 miles or less from where it was produced. This produces groups of people who are extremely loyal to their type of rice. As people migrate to all corners of the world, they take their rice tastes with them causing traditionally locally grown and consumed rice to be traded on the global market. This causes the consumer base for trendy exotic rice with names like Indian basmati and Thai jasmine to widen (thanks a lot Trader Joes and Whole Foods) as more and more people who are not from the rice’s indigenous area to develop a taste for it. The more problematic feature about the rice market is that consumers become connoisseurs, unwilling to switch to Uncle Ben’s when the prices spike. Childs notices that America’s crop of long-grain and medium-grain rice is strong, but consumers want basmati. However, the countries that produce basmati don’t want their newfound foreign consumers as they are limiting exports to alleviate demand for this rice at home.
But exotic tastes aren’t the only factors behind the food crisis. Recently, land traditionally used for agriculture has been used to produce biofuel. A move decided upon to help solve global climate change has produced another global problem- high food prices. Crop yield is low due to environmental factors, but farmers cannot grow more food-oriented crops because they have focused on the production of crops like oilseed. Furthermore, food that would traditionally be consumed, like corn, is being used to produce fuel, increasing the price of this staple as well. Ironically, rising oil prices have also contributed to rising food prices because the food needs to be transported in vehicles that need gas and farmed using fertilizer. Furthermore, a rising middle class in India and China has produced large groups of people with the resources to buy more food and more substantial food like meat. Meat takes grain to produce, its what the living versions of what will be meat eat, which, in turn, drives up the price of grain.
Because the global market produces the problem, the whole market is feeling the crunch. Riots have broken out worldwide causing serious security concerns and leaving citizens dead. Pictures of the riots in Haiti, Mozambique, and Bangladesh have been plastered all over the Internet, but Americans are feeling the strain here as well, causing candidates to address it on the campaign trail as well. Rising food prices could be a problem bigger than terrorism or oil prices, because they affect every living person on the planet. Further exacerbating the problem is a concept that Time reporter Tony Karon noticed: it is not like there is no food; it’s just that people cannot afford the food that there is. This makes the prospect of looting a store filled with food one’s family needs but cannot afford very attractive. This causes widespread dissent in countries where dissent was already a reality and has led to very real ramifications for the international political system. An example is Haiti, where the Prime Minister in Haiti was ousted last Saturday. So my main point for writing this whole blog is to ask one question. What does this mean for realism? We are living in an age where not only multinational corporations and organizations affect the international system, but also ideas as abstract as globalization and as real as hunger. What does it mean for an ideology that denies these things sway over the international system?

Some websites I used:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/04/24/rice.prices.ap/index.html?iref=newssearch
http://www.cnn.com/2008/BUSINESS/04/22/brown.food.ap/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/americas/04/14/world.food.crisis/index.html
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1717572,00.html
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1730107,00.html