Here’s the link and associated description:
Global Food Crisis
April 9, 2008
In some countries, food inflation is turning violent, with Divya Reddy, Eurasia Group; Victor Lespinasse, GrainAnalyst.com; and CNBC’s Erin Burnett.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=707473516
The video stream takes a bit of time to load — or at least it does through my satellite Internet connection — but it’s worth watching, not only for its images of common people in Egypt rioting in the streets on April 7 while police in riot gear stand by but also for its speculations about the combination of natural/environmental and manmade economic factors that are causing this crisis. The price of rice is soaring. Who or what is to blame? That’s the question of the hour.
Is it just me or is this kind of news segment, especially the opening part showing video footage of the actual rioting, invested with a kind of apocalyptic aura that we have traditionally associated with fiction? It’s the kind of thing I would expect to see, and indeed have seen many times before, in dystopian movies that show fictional television news reports from a future society that’s crumbling.
That future, it would seem, is now.
For me, YouTube videos tend to load more quickly and easily than CNBC and other news site videos, so here’s a YouTube stream of an Al Jazeera story (running time: 1:40) about the same event.
The associated text says, “More than two hundred people have been arrested across Egypt after a day of protest over rising food prices and low wages. The worst trouble was in the northern city of Mahalla, where thousands of people battled with riot police. The violence there came late in the day, after it appeared a heavy security presence had succeeded in preventing any trouble.”