August 7, 2012, Cue food riots
Brother Dmitry lays out the various current conditions (particularly, widespread drought and crop loss), and diagnoses conditions of general unpleasantness (including food riots) in many parts of the planet.
While the United States is by no means on top of "the vulnerable" list, it is certainly not on the bottom. Particularly critical is the 50-million strong food stamp population (whether his fault or not, in sheer numbers, my classmate Barack really is the food stamp president), the irony is that the cost for the "SNAP" program was a comedically low $76 billion-- a preposterously low figure to keep the rubes here from rioting when compared to other budgetary figures for, say, prisons or "health care" or "national security" (supposedly to protect us from "them," from somewhere else.)
Nonetheless, in the opera buffa called our political process, this bulwark-against-the-peasants-rioting... may be under threat (and as Brother Dmitry observes, it will unquestionably not keep up with food prices if they rise or even explode in dollar terms). As Kunstler observes, "Take away the pizza pockets and the Pepsi and anything can happen."
Don't expect the powerful (that would be Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, et als.) to take steps to ease things for the peasants, either... savvy investors might consider manufacturers of tear gas, riot shields and that sort of thing.