Food and Syria's failure By Spengler

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Middle East Mar 29, 2011

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Food and Syria's failure By Spengler "In the south it all started after a group of school students started to write some sort of proclamations and complaints, protesting against growing food prices," Middle East analyst Vladimir Ahmedov told The Voice of Russia March 24. Arab-language Syrian press reports and blog posts indicate that the administration of President Basher al-Assad tried to prevent a rise in food prices, but provoked instead a wave of hoarding that has pushed the price of staples like oil and rice "above the purchasing power of consumers", as the online daily al-Tashreen reported from Damascus March 27. As I wrote in Food and failed Arab states (Asia Times Online February 2, 2011), the newly prosperous consumers of Asia have priced food grains out of the reach of the destitute Arab poor. This is a tsunami which no government in the region can resist. Of all the prospectively failed states in the region, Syria seemed the least vulnerable, with a determined and vicious regime prepared to inflict unspeakable brutality on its opponents, and its inability to contain unrest is a frightening gauge of the magnitude of the shock. The Arab bazaar speculates in foodstuffs as aggressively as hedge funds, and the Syrian government's attempt last month to keep food prices down prompted local merchants to hoard commodities with a long shelf life. Fruit and vegetable prices, by contrast, remain low, because the bazaar does not hoard perishables. The fact that prices rose after the government announced high-profile measures to prevent such a rise exposed the fecklessness of the Assad regime. In response to the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings, President Assad reduced taxes on oil and sugar, and cut import tariffs on basic foodstuffs. This action had unintended consequences. A blogger on the Syrian website sy-weather.com reports, "I spent fifteen days on formalities to reduce customs duties on some basic food items, but I have not seen a glimmer of hope on the horizon. This was supposed to reduce the prices of the targeted goods. On the contrary, a liter of oil that sold for 65 Syrian pounds [US$1.38] now sells for 85 pounds." That's an increase of 30% over the month. Other bloggers report that the prices of basic foodstuffs have risen by 25% to 30%. What happened is seen frequently in Third World command economies: local importers bribe customs officials to control the flow of goods, and then hoard them. "The only beneficiaries of the price-reduction decrees," the blogger concluded, "are the traders." What are essentially dictatorships like Syria rule through corruption. It is not an incidental fact of life, but the primary means of maintaining loyalty to the regime. Under normal circumstances such regimes can last indefinitely. Under severe external stress, the web of corrupt power relations decays into a scramble for individual advantage. The doubling of world food prices over the past year has overwhelmed the Assad family's ability to manage through the usual mechanisms. The Syrians sense the weakness of the regime, which rests on the narrow base of the Alawi religious minority. Virtually every sector of Syrian society has a grudge against the Assads, most of all the Muslim Brotherhood, which led an uprising in the city of Hama in 1982 that Hafez al-Assad crushed with casualties estimated at between 10,000 and 20,000. Ethnic fractures have not yet contributed to the unrest, but the country's Kurds are "ready, watching and waiting to take to the streets, as their cause is the strongest", as Robert Lowe, manager of the Middle East Center at the London School of Economics, told CNN on March 24. Dow Jones-UBS Grains Subindex From the Straits of Gibraltar to the Hindu Kush, instability will afflict the Muslim world for a generation, and there is nothing that the West can do to stop it. Almost no-one in Washington appears to be asking the obvious question: what should the United States do in the event that there are no solutions at all? READ THE REST HERE