Food security risks soar as prices breach critical threshold

“Every society is three meals away from chaos” ~ Vladimir Lenin

Violent protests in North Africa and the Middle East in 2011 — commonly known as the Arab Spring — as well as earlier riots in 2008, coincided with sharp increases in global food prices. A decade later global food prices have once again breached a critical threshold, above which food price riots are thought much more likely to occur.

In late 2010 researchers from the New England Complex Systems Institute in the United States examined the…