A report published in October 2012 by the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI) links soaring corn and agricultural commodity prices to food riots and turmoil in North Africa and the Middle East.

Although several factors may contribute to political unrest, acknowledge Dr. Yaneer Bar-Yam and two co-authors, “the timing of violent protests in North Africa and the Middle East in 2011 as well as earlier riots in 2008 coincides with large peaks in global food prices.” In poor countries with little or no local agriculture to “buffer” swings in global supply conditions, the central government “may be perceived to have a critical role in food security. Failure to provide security undermines the very reason for existence of the political system.”

In short:

When the ability of the political system to provide security for the population breaks down, popular support disappears. Conditions of widespread threat to security are particularly present when food is inaccessible to the population at large.

Soaring food prices triggered food riots in both 2008 and 2011.

Figure explanation (references omitted): Time dependence of FAO Food Price Index from January 2004 to May 2011. Red dashed vertical lines correspond to beginning dates of “food riots” and protests associated with the major recent unrest in North Africa and the Middle East. The overall death toll is reported in parentheses. Blue vertical line indicates the date, December 13, 2010, on which Dr. Bar-Yam and colleagues submitted a report to the U.S. government, warning of the link between food prices, social unrest and political instability. Inset shows FAO Food Price Index from 1990 to 2011.

At first glance, the NECSI report may seem to belabor the obvious. Hunger breeds desperation; desperation, violence; and violence, instability. But the report does more than correlate food riots with food prices. It also postulates a threshold beyond which food prices likely trigger violence.

In a follow-on study published last month, Bar-Yam and colleagues examine the political repercussions of the U.S. 2012 summer drought, which led to a new increase in corn prices. Through the fall, global maize (corn) prices ”remained at a threshold above which the riots and revolutions had predominantly occurred” in 2011. On the other hand, commodity prices in general “remained at the threshold above which violence was found in 2008-09 and 2010-11.” So what happened?

Violent protest broke out in South Africa, “a heavily maize-dependent country” where ”consumer food indices have increased dramatically.”

Coinciding with the food price increases this summer, massive labor strikes in mining and agriculture have led to the greatest single incident of social violence since the fall of apartheid in 1994. Worker demands for dramatic pay increases reflect that their wages have not kept up with drastic increases in the prices of necessities, especially food.

Food-related protests and riots in 2012 also occurred in Haiti and Argentina.

The graph below shows the food price threshold above which riots are predicted to occur. The authors note that since mid-2011 the global food price index has “hovered around the threshold value.”

Figure explanation (references omitted): Global food price index since 2002. The threshold above which widespread food riots and revolutions occurred in 2008-08 and 2010-11 is shown both without (solid red) and with (dashed red) inflation. Whether incomes of poor populations increase with inflation depends on local conditions and national policies.

The authors argue that, “When prices are significantly higher than the threshold, as they were in 2007-08 and 2010-11, widespread violence can be expected. When the prices are proximate to the threshold, incidents of violence should be more sensitive to the specifics of local conditions,” such as national income support policies and the extent to which local prices move with global prices.

In South Africa, though, “The unusually violent and deadly worker riots at platinum mines starting in August of 2012 coincided both with record global maize prices and record high prices for basic food items . . .” Similarly, “xenophobic riots in May of 2008 stood out as the bloodiest violence since apartheid. These riots coincided with food riots around the world during a previous peak of global food prices.”

Figure explanation (references omitted): Consumer price index for bread and cereals in South Africa since 2002 (black, left axis) and global maize prices (blue, right axis). Red solid vertical line indicates beginning of deadly riots in platinum mines, and red dashed line indicates period of severe xenophobic riots. Local prices have increased with global prices but have not correspondingly decreased when prices declined.

So in 2012-2013 what is pushing maize prices up to and beyond the violence threshold? The drought is a factor. The researchers also blame two policies: the “deregulation of commodity futures markets” and the “diversion of almost 50% of the US maize crop to ethanol.” Those policies, they contend, “are ill-advised and should be changed.”

Bar-Yam and his colleagues are surely right about the Soviet-style central planning scheme euphemistically called the “Renewable Fuel Standard.” They do not explain (at least in these papers) why curbing economic liberty would make commodity markets more efficient or make food more affordable over the long term. Blaming speculators for causing or exacerbating food shortages and famines is one of the world’s oldest economic fallacies.

Do biofuel mandates and subsidies inflate food prices? Do they increase world hunger ? There was a rip-roaring debate on the food security impacts of biofuel policies in 2007-2008, when sharp spikes in wheat, corn, and rice prices imperiled an estimated 100 million people in developing countries. Food price riots broke out in Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Indonesia, Mexico, Mozambique, Senegal, Somalia, and Yemen.

Experts attributed the rapid rise in food prices to several factors including high petroleum prices, drought in Australia, a weak U.S. dollar, commodity speculation, and rising demand for grain-fed meat by China’s rapidly expanding middle class. But some also laid part of the blame on biofuel policies, which artificially increase global demand for corn and soy while diverting those crops and farmland from food to fuel production. A July 2008 World Bank report argued that biofuel policies accounted for as much as two-thirds of the 2007-2008 price spike. A July 2010 World Bank report, on the other hand, concluded that rising petroleum prices were the dominant factor. “Biofuels played some role too, but much less than previously thought,” the report stated.

Where does the debate stand today? Recent reports by the National Research Council (NRC), the New England Complex Systems Institute (CSI), the UN Committee on World Food Security (CWFS), and Iowa State University (ISU) all acknowledge that biofuel policies put upward pressure on food and feed prices. The NRC and ISU studies argue that U.S. biofuel policies have only modest impacts on grain prices whereas the CSI and CWFS studies indicate that biofuel policies contributed significantly to the 2008 global food crisis and/or pose significant risks to global food security today.

Links to these reports and key excerpts follow.

National Research Council, Renewable Fuel Standard: Potential Economic and Environmental Effects of U.S. Biofuel Policy (2011):

Food-based biofuel is one of many factors that contributed to upward price pressure on agricultural commodities, food, and livestock feed since 2007; other factors affecting those prices included growing population overseas, crop failures in other countries, high oil prices, decline in the value of the U.S. dollar, and speculative activity in the marketplace.

To date, the agricultural commodities most affected by U.S. biofuels production are corn and soybean. The increased competition for these commodities created by an expanding biofuels market has contributed to upward pressure on their prices, but the increase has had a small effect on consumers’ food retail prices, except livestock products, because corn and soybean typically undergo some processing before reaching consumers’ food basket. The difference between the price of an unprocessed commodity and the retail price of processed food is typically large. The committee estimated that an increase of 20-40 percent in agricultural commodity prices would result in an increase in the retail price of most processed grocery food products (for example, breakfast cereal and bread) containing those commodities of only 1 to 2 percent.

New England Complex Systems Institute, Food Crises: A quantitative model of food prices including speculators and ethanol conversion (September 2011):

We further systematically consider other proposed factors affecting food prices. We provide quantitative evidence excluding all of them from playing a major role in recent price changes except corn to ethanol conversion. We show that, aside from the high price peaks, the underlying trends of increasing food prices match the increases in the rate of ethanol conversion.

Only a small fraction of the production of corn before 2000, corn ethanol consumed a remarkable 40% of US corn crops in 2011, promoted by US government subsidies based upon the objective of energy independence, and advocacy by industry groups. Corn serves a wide variety of purposes in the food supply system and therefore has impact across the food market. Corn prices also a ect the price of other crops due to substitutability at the consumer end and competition for land at the production end.

Regulation of markets and government subsidies to promote corn to ethanol conversion have distorted the existing economic allocation by diverting food to energy use. This raised equilibrium prices, increased energy supply by a small fraction (US corn ethanol accounted for less than 1% of US energy consumption in 2009 and reduced grain for food by a much larger one (US corn used for ethanol production is 4.3% of the total world grain production, even after allowing for the feed byproduct.

A parsimonious explanation that accounts for food price change dynamics over the past seven years can be based upon only two factors: speculation and corn to ethanol conversion. We can attribute the sharp peaks in 2007/2008 and 2010/2011 to speculation, and the underlying upward trend to biofuels. The impact of changes in all other factors is small enough to be neglected in comparison to these effects.

UN Committee on World Food Security Security, A Report by the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition, Price volatility and food security (July 2011):

Biofuel support policies in the United States and the European Union have created a demand shock that is widely considered to be one of the major causes of the international food price rise of 2007/08.

By generating a new demand for food commodities that can outbid poor countries and food-insecure populations, industrial biofuels highlight the tension between a potentially unlimited demand (in this case for energy) and the constraints of a world with finite resources. Several proposals linked to changes in existing mandates could reduce the likelihood of biofuel production contributing to price spikes.

Given the major roles played by biofuels in diverting food to energy use, the CFS should demand of governments the abolition of targets on biofuels and the removal of subsidies and tariffs on biofuel production and processing.

Bruce A. Babcock, Center for Agricultural and Rural Development, Iowa State University, The Impact of U.S. Biofuel Policies on Agricultural Price Levels and Volatility (June 2011):

It is indisputable that biofuels contribute to higher agricultural commodity prices because the biofuel industry represents a large and growing share of demand for maize, vegetable oil and sugarcane. But biofuel production levels are not driven solely by government subsidies. Biofuels are the only large-scale substitute for liquid transportation fuels, so when crude oil prices rise, so too does the demand for biofuels. Furthermore, high agricultural commodity prices are not caused solely by expanded biofuel demand.

. . . a large expansion in US ethanol production would have occurred even if the subsidies and mandates had not been in place. The reason is that the return on investment in ethanol would have been so high that investors still would have brought their capital to the industry. As shown, the model indicates that in 2009, ethanol production would have been about 1.2 billion gallons lower without subsidies. The largest difference in production would have been in the 2008 marketing year when subsidies increased ethanol production by more than 2.3 billion gallons.

Market-based expansion of ethanol contributed about 50 percent to the difference in maize prices between 2004 and 2009. The direct conclusion of these results is that ethanol subsidies have had little impact on crop prices and that market-based expansion of ethanol had a large impact on maize prices, a modest impact on wheat prices and practically no impact on soybean and rice prices over this time period.

Overall, these results indicate that the effects of both ethanol subsidies and market-driven expansion of ethanol on US food prices have been small.

I may comment further on these reports in a future post. In the meantime, I will simply observe that if Babcock is correct, and U.S. biofuel policies have only a small influence on food prices because “a large expansion in US ethanol production would have occurred even if the subsidies and mandates had not been in place,” then U.S. taxpayers get little or no energy-security bang for billions of biofuel bucks.

As former OMB analyst Ken Glozer, author of Corn Ethanol: Who Pays, Who Benefits? explains in an op-ed based on his book:

The costs of ethanol policies are enormous, estimated at more than $500 billion to American consumers and taxpayers from 2008 to 2017. The taxpayer costs include subsidies to corn growers and for ethanol production.

The EIA forecast shows that current federal ethanol policy produces a minuscule additional amount of ethanol over what would be produced using a competitive market policy in the foreseeable future. In 2010, a mere 600 million gallons of additional ethanol were produced, roughly 5 percent of the 13 billion total gallons produced. In 2015, federal policies will increase production by just 1.4 billion gallons. The latter is less than 1 percent of U.S. gasoline consumption, and the cost per barrel of petroleum import reduction is an astounding $2,171.

From Glozer’s book: