Is food price inflation to blame for the Egyptian troubles?

SWIP's Richard Dunbar discusses whether the free market will bring prices back from recent highs in time to prevent further economic and political damage.

If evidence were needed of the consequences of a hungry world, Tunisia and Egypt have brought it onto our television screens. In the UK, we may all be feeling a bit of a squeeze on our trips to the supermarket these days, but in other parts of the world the situation has become rather more grave. Certainly there is far more to the political instability in North Africa than the rising price of food, but it has been an important catalyst (a grocer’s self-immolation set things off in Tunisia). It’s a problem the world has wrestled with for hundreds of years. Back in the 18th century, the Br...