Gigi Ibrahim waves the egyptian flag in Tahrir Square, February 3, 2011. Creative Commons photo by Al Jazeera English

In the search for underlying causes of the Middle-Eastern revolts, food, technology, Twitter, and social media have been identified as possible suspects. Last week, Dylan Robertson argued here that these are in fact food revolutions—that drastically increasing food prices had worn away at citizens (commenter Jen Hassum said that “bread determinism” wasn’t entirely true either; I think we can agree that people act for all kinds of individual reasons). Recently scholars and journalists have focused instead on a specific demographic that is determined to initiate change. Recent Time Magazine and BusinessWeek cover stories refer to the “ticking time bomb” of youth unemployment in countries like Egypt, Tunisia and Iran.

There is a large part of the Middle East and North Africa, about 16 countries, were more the half the population is under 30 years of age. That’s six out of every ten people. This is what has been dubbed the “youth bulge.” Millions of young people throughout the Middle East have been too frustrated for too long with the constraints of their government and lack of future job prospects. The sense of hopelessness, stemming from over education and limited employment opportunities has reached a breaking point.

With governments who neglect to invest in the younger generation, and weak economies and industries, (the largest Tunisian industries are agriculture, tourism, mining and textiles), possibilities for the future have seemed very bleak.

The highest youth unemployment rates are in north Africa and the Middle East, at 24 per cent each. In December 2010, 18 percent of 16 to 24-year-olds in the U.S. were unemployed. 11 percent of young Canadian were unemployed in 2007, and the The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development predicts that globally this rate will steadily increase until the end of 2011.

Though miles away, young Canadian and American university grads know the sting of applying to dozens of jobs and hearing back from none. Many attribute this brick wall to the older generation of workers who are holding on to their jobs; some cite the faster pace of business today, which doesn’t have time or resources to train fresh workers.

So without any job prospects, the large population of unemployed youth are forced to work informal low paying jobs, create employment for themselves, or, of course, wait until the recession ends and their elders retire. There’s a sense of helplessness out there.

Young people therefore either end up living at home or heading back to school, with free time to grow increasingly frustrated and depressed. Former Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak’s strategy to deal with youth unemployment was to increase college enrolments. But more education creates more people who aren’t OK with blind obedience to their government. Jack A. Goldstone, a sociologist at George Mason University School of Public Policy quoted in that BusinessWeek article, feels that democracies are “much better at managing large numbers of highly educated people. Spain’s youth unemployment is even higher than Egypt’s, but young Spaniards aren’t trying to overthrow the government.”

Yet another road block for this eager generation, is the fact that they are attempting to enter the job force in a recovering economy. A 2009 study called Growing up in a Recession: Beliefs and the Macroeconomy, looks at the connection between macroeconomic experience and individual attitude constructed during the ‘formative’ years (18-24). Individuals that live through a recession during these years are more likely to “believe that luck rather than effort is the most important driver of individual success, support more government redistribution, and have less confidence in institutions.”

For now, thousands of Egyptian youth feel good about what they have accomplished the first steps towards change  on their own terms—and without the meddling of the West. The next question is how Egypt, Tunisia, and their neighbours will begin to address the acute need for adequate work for their revolutionary generation.

Media determinists of all stripes have hailed the role of Twitter, Facebook and other social media in prompting the recent pan-Arab revolts. Though it could be argued that these revolts were bound to happen eventually, the catalyst isn’t likely social media — it’s food.

One of the main causes of the French Revolution was a combination of a mismanaged economy and climate change that resulted in soaring bread prices. The Egyptian uprisings have been compared to the French Revolution by many columnists (and the comparison dismissed, as well). On the same note, The Daily Telegraph declared the events in Tunisia and Egypt to be “food revolutions.”

The cost of food is on the rise, with devastating impacts across the Global South. At the start of a recent podcast episode, NPR’s Planet Money discussed the rising cost of wheat, which makes up roughly 70 percent of bread prices in Egypt but only two percent in the U.S.

The Western world tends to feel less impact in fluctuation of food commodities because so much of the cost of food goes to packaging, marketing and processing. In addition, Western countries have stockpiles of grain unimaginable in the developing world.

Planet Money also gives a comprehensive breakdown of just how crazy worldwide changes in food costs have been and what’s causing them. As one of our most basic needs, food plays a huge role in security and diplomacy.

After wheat prices jumped 25 per cent in one day in 2008, the UN held a food security summit in Rome and urged governments to invest in agriculture. The conference’s final declaration warned of disastrous crises that were not just looming, but well under way.

Food and famine has driven much of the world’s relations with North Korea. Meanwhile China — estimated to supply North Korea with 40 percent of its food — faces its worst drought in 60 years.

Last summer’s Russian forest fires resulted in a shortfall of tonnes of grain, prompting Putin to halt wheat exports for both 2010 and 2011 harvests. This summer we’ll learn the impact of this change, along with the effects of flooding in Pakistan and Australia, as well as natural disasters in numerous other countries.

Meanwhile, the cost of food continues to reach historic highs, which Bill Clinton believes could worsen if companies use too many crops for biofuels.

Unless climate change gets under control and we use food resources more efficiently, we can expect more such revolutions in the years to come.

[Creative Commons photo by Flickr user adactio]

February 4 anti-Mubarak protest in Alexandria, Egypt. Creative Commons photo by Al Jazeera English

In Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, even Italy, citizens are rising up, risking their lives to protest their corrupt governments. Egyptians, in a historical event, have proven they can be successful in overthrowing years of dictatorial leadership. Canadians were mostly cheering along (though our government wasn’t), but’s hard to put ourselves in their place—Canada, flawed though it is, is simply not Egypt. Corruption here is less pervasive; the military less present in our everyday lives; we have a functional political opposition. But since freedom, democracy, and human rights are on everyone’s mind right now, perhaps it’s time for a little self-evaluation session.

The uprisings in the Middle East should prompt Canadians to take a closer look at the state of our own politics. For just one recent example, see the recent KAIROS “not” scandal and assess how democratic our government’s behaviour truly is. Murray Dobbin on Rabble stopped just short of comparing Steven Harper to ousted Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, and called Harper’s Conservative cabinet a squad of “hit men.”

But would Canadians ever reach the point where we just couldn’t take it anymore? Could we rebel in  Egypt-like protests? Would our rants to friends or angry blog comments ever manifest as rebellion in the street?

Stereotypically, Canadians are polite and retiring; unconfrontational if you’re being nice about it, apathetic if you’re not. But there’s data to prove that we really don’t like things to get politically messy. Besides our dismal-and-getting-worse voter turnout rate, A 2000 General Social Survey by Statistics Canada found that only 9 percent of Canadians (age 15 and up) had participated in a public debate that year (things like calling radio talkback shows or writing letters to the editor). Half of those individuals researched information on political issues, and 10 percent volunteered for a political party. We also seem naturally more inclined to express our opinions with a group that we know will share or agree with our own opinions.

Historically, if Canadians take the time to understand a politcal issue, then get mad about it, we will find a way to express it. Like the time time the Conservative government decided prorogue parliament; a 63 day break while 36 government bills lay untouched. While plenty of us apparently didn’t know what the heck that meant, 200,000 Canadians got angry, logged onto Facebook and joined a group called Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament. Many attended actual rallies across the country.

If you were in Toronto in the summer of 2010, you witnessed Canadians in a more traditional form of protest during the G20 conference. Over 300 people were arrested and the images of Toronto streets seemed almost unrecognizable, as if it were a different country altogether.

The erosion of Western democracy seems to be everywhere you turn lately. Paul Krugman identified the union-busting tactics of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker as just the latest example of a hemisphere-wide push by anti-democratic forces: “What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy,” Krugman wrote.

Dobbin’s Rabble column sounds the same alarm for Canada: He calls Minister of International Cooperation Bev Oda’s corrections of the CIDA report “political thuggery worthy of a dictatorship.”  This seems to be just one example of our democracy moving backwards while citizens of Italy, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen are actively involved in taking back control of their respective countries.