I don’t know if the rest of y’all have been watching commodities prices lately, but I have, and what I’m seeing is starting to really scare me. A lot.

The Great Drought of 2012 hasn’t yet come to a conclusion, but we already know that its consequences are going to be pretty devastating. With more than one-half of America’s counties designated as drought disaster areas, the 2012 harvest of corn, soybeans, and other food staples is going to fall far short of predictions. This is going to boost food prices, both domestically and abroad, to go through the roof, and it’s going to cause increased misery for farmers and low-income Americans and far greater hardship for poor people in countries that rely on imported U.S. grains.

Unfortunately, this is only the beginning of a pretty nasty scenario for the entire world, not just this country. Look back at what history tells us about what the lack of good, abundant food leads to: violent social unrest and even more violent confrontations. After all, you can have all the money in the world, and if it won’t even buy enough food to feed your family, what good does it do? Food, by which I mean clean, affordable food, is essential to human survival and well-being. Take that away, and people become anxious, desperate, and angry. In the United States, food represents only about 13% of the average household budget, a relatively small share, so a boost in food prices in 2013 will probably not prove overly taxing for most middle - and upper - income families. It could, however, produce considerable hardship for poor and unemployed Americans with limited resources. “You are talking about a real bite out of family budgets,” commented Ernie Gross, an agricultural economist at Omaha’s Creighton University. This could add to the discontent already evident in depressed and high-unemployment areas, which might actually prompt an intensified backlash against incumbent politicians as well as other forms of dissent and unrest - like food riots.

People don’t remember or even seem to care that there were serious food riots in a double dozen Third World countries in 2007- 2008. After all, who CARES what those smelly, non-English speaking, non-white folks are up to? And if a bunch of them die, well, so what? Just leaves more room for the rest of us, right?

WRONG. If food riots could happen there, what makes any of y’all think that it couldn’t happen here?

We’re diverting a lot of food resources into the making of biofuels, for example. That means that there are fewer raw materials, like corn, wheat and soybeans, to feed people and a lot less silage from those same raw materials to feed animals. The next price spike in 2010-11 was, however, closely associated with climate change, unlike the price spike in 2007 - 2008, which was blamed on the high price of oil. An intense drought gripped much of eastern Russia during the summer of 2010, reducing the wheat harvest in that breadbasket region by one-fifth and prompting Moscow to ban all wheat exports. Drought also hurt China’s grain harvest, while intense flooding destroyed much of Australia’s wheat crop. Together with other extreme-weather-related effects, these disasters sent wheat prices soaring by more than 50% and the price of most food staples by 32%.

Oops.

And now, to the Arab Spring, where a huge surge in food prices resulted in widespread social unrest, this time concentrated in North Africa and the Middle East. The earliest protests arose over the cost of staples in Algeria and then Tunisia, where (no coincidence) the final straw that broke the camel’s back and which was the seminal even that precipitated the riots was a young food vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, who set himself on fire to protest government harassment. The Arab Spring was the direct result of several factors: anger over rising food and fuel prices combined with long-simmering resentments about government repression and corruption. The rising cost of basic staples, especially a loaf of bread, was also a cause of unrest in Egypt, Jordan, and Sudan. Other factors, notably anger at entrenched autocratic regimes, may have proved more powerful in those places, but as the author of Tropic of Chaos, Christian Parenti, wrote, “The initial trouble was traceable, at least in part, to the price of that loaf of bread.”

If this was just one bad harvest, occurring in only one country, the world could and probably would undoubtedly be able to absorb the ensuing hardships and expect to bounce back in the years to come. Unfortunately, it’s becoming evident that the Great Drought of 2012 is not a one-off event in a single heartland nation, but rather an inevitable consequence of global warming which is only going to intensify. As a result, we can expect not just more bad years of extreme heat, but worse years, hotter and more often, and not just in the United States, but globally for the indefinite future.

When we think seriously about climate change (if we think about it at all, and most of us don’t), we think about rapidly rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, freakish storms, hellish wildfires, and rising sea levels. Gee, isn't that what's been happening in this country for the past couple of years? Among other things, this will eventually result in a seriously damaged infrastructure and pretty badly diminished food supplies. Of course, these manifestations are of warming in the physical world, not the social world we all inhabit and rely on for so many aspects of our daily well-being and survival. The purely physical effects of climate change will prove to be catastrophic.

However, - and this is more frightening to me at least - the social effects including, somewhere down the line, food riots, mass starvation, state collapse, mass migrations, and conflicts of every sort, up to and including full-scale war, could prove even more disruptive and deadly. We’ve got a real danger here of being IN a real-life version of the Hunger Games, folks. And not just in the Third World countries, either. We have a real danger of that right here, RIGHT NOW, in this country. There is a day coming when there are going to be wars over both arable land and potable water - and I’m very much afraid that they are going to happen in our lifetime.

So, what’s the solution? I haven’t got a clue. Neither does anybody else, for that matter. WonderWife and I have a garden this year, and I’m canning fruits and vegetables for all I’m worth. I’m also drying foods like corn and beans and making dried meat jerkies. We’ve got a cistern in the back yard to catch whatever rainfall there is to water our garden and our yard. We also bought reloading equipment for our guns. If nothing else, we will at least be able to shoot meat animals for food.

Desperate times are coming, folks. Kinda makes the survivalists look sane, doesn’t it?