VIJAY PRASHAD: First, Amy, Happy New Year! It’s Happy New Year in my birth area of Bengal today. It’s an interesting period to commemorate the end of a year, which one part would bring us, as the head of the IMF said, out of the pandemic, and instead, of course, it’s brought us into war and sanctions.
I want to remind people that a decade ago, when there was a drought in Ukraine and in Russia, where about 25% of the world’s wheat is exported into, when there was that drought in 2010, there was a major uprising, not only in the Arab world, which we call the Arab Spring, but across the African continent, now long forgotten, I think. It’s important to remember that when there is a crisis in food and when food prices go up, the political crisis is almost immediate. There’s already been an economic crisis in Sri Lanka that’s metastasized into a political crisis. We’ve seen the government fall in Pakistan. Around the world we see food price inflation creates serious problems for governments. Before this war and the sanctions against Russia, 2.7 billion people struggled with hunger. It’s likely that we’ll go above 3 billion before the month is over. We’re also going to see, I think, catastrophic problems with disruptions in fuel distribution.
— source democracynow.org | Apr 15, 2022