I am struck that very little of the commentary on the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions is dealing with underlying dynamics. The names are different, but all of these countries are exactly the same--crushing poverty, pervasive, systemic corruption and brutal oppression.

None of this is accidental. At some point in each country's past, the takers overwhelmed the producers and the death spiral began. I've always loved the Heinlein quote on this observation.

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded- here and there, now and then- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.This is known as "bad luck.".

More to the point, the tiny minority of rain-makers are only possible in a culture that celebrates freedom, innovation and dreams. Once that culture is transformed into one of exploitation, resentment and entitlement, the country is screwed.

Egypt's revolution is a lesson in the fragility of the totalitarian model. Like most revolutions, the trigger that topples the crumbling structure often seems like the attribution of hurricanes to the flutter of butterfly wings thousands of miles distant. Just as the poor harvests of 1788 led directly to the French revolution, changes in the global markets for grain have produced combustible social stresses virtually simultaneously in Tunisia and Egypt.

The immediate cause of this food spike was the worst drought in Russia and the Black Sea region for 130 years, lasting long enough to damage winter planting as well as the summer harvest. Russia imposed an export ban on grains. This was compounded by late rains in Canada, Nina disruptions in Argentina, and a series of acreage downgrades in the US. The world’s stocks-to-use ratio for corn is nearing a 30-year low of 12.8pc, according to Rabobank.

The deeper causes are well-known: an annual rise in global population by 73m; the “exhaustion” of the Green Revolution as the gains in crop yields fade, to cite the World Bank; diet shifts in Asia as the rising middle class switch to animal-protein diets, requiring 3-5 kilos of grain feed for every kilo of meat produced; the biofuel mandates that have diverted a third of the US corn crop into ethanol for cars.

Add the loss of farmland to Asia’s urban sprawl, and the depletion of the non-renewable acquivers for irrigation of North China’s plains, and the geopolitics of global food supply starts to look neuralgic.

Can the world head off mass famine? Yes, with leadership. The regions of the ex-Soviet Union farm 30m hectares less today than in the Khrushchev era, and yields are half western levels.

While successive western governments have traipsed over to Israel and the West Bank to once more fruitlessly argue for peace, the real levers of geopolitical power appear to be commodities.

Remember that as you contemplate the Obama administration's refusal to grant oil and mining leases in this country....