Calm has followed chaos in Mozambique. Whether it is going to last we don’t know. But the more salient question is whether or not food shortages across the world are going to lead to similar uprisings. Much of the worst of the global economic crisis has actually missed Africa, in part, at least, because of the nature of that crisis (housing bubbles and buying risky financial assets does not tend to dominate the smaller-scale economies of most of Africa) and in part because when you’re at the bottom rung of the economic ladder there is not far to drop.
