Food for thought

Politicians are wedded to cheap food the world over. When food prices increase rapidly, politicians tend to end up hanging from lamp posts in some parts of the world and voted smartly out in others. The Arab Spring and rioting across South America were driven in part by a series of climate-induced harvest failures, the resultant commodity shortages driving up the prices of bread, tortillas, rice and other basics. The bottom tier of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid (a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling human needs in priority) quickly became unobtainable to swathes of the population.

This fear of food inflation has led politicians to adopt short-termism, cheap food at any cost, policies. Globalism and low tariff/tariff-free trade allows food to move across borders from countries where production standards are lower, human rights laxer and wage rates paltry. The UK farmers, processors