People Revolt With Their Bellie

• People may vote with their pocketbooks, but more often than not, they revolt with their bellies. If you want to predict where political instability, revolution, coups d’etat, or interstate warfare will occur, the best factor to keep an eye on is not GDP, the human development index, or energy prices.
• “If I were to pick a single indicator—economic, political, social—that I think will tell us more than any other, it would be the price of grain,”

Two events have renewed interest among scholars in the relationship between food prices and political instability. The first was the 2007–08 food crisis, which triggered food riots in countries from Haiti to Bangladesh to Mozambique.

The second was the Arab Spring, the first signs of which ...