Food price spikes in unexpected places

Russian wheat, sure, but I never saw Korean cabbage coming:

One head of cabbage can now cost over 11,000 won ($10), more than pork and up from 2,000-3,000 won a year ago (see chart). Kimchi is now being dubbed keum-chi, the first syllable being Korean for gold.

The triggers seems to be the classics - poor harvest, perhaps exacerbated by hoarding - and I think it would be a bridge too far to connect this definitively to broader trends of global food price inflation, climate change, etc. But it is becoming a local political issue:

President Lee Myung-bak says he will be getting his personal stash from Western producers, earning him comparisons to Marie-Antoinette from South Korea’s numerous and critical bloggers.

... and I think it is worthwhile to keep track of these sorts of things.

Water as a weapon

I knew water is causing problems, but I didn't think of it as a weapon itself - until I saw this from FP Passport:

North Korea appears to have deliberately opened a dam that sent water surging down a river into South Korea, a top South Korean official said Wednesday, but he stopped short of calling it an attack.

Six South Koreans camping and fishing at the river were swept to their deaths last weekend after North Korea unleashed an estimated 40 million tons of water from a new dam into a river at the border without providing prior notice.

This does seem like an anomalous situation; it is much easier to imagine countries expressing belligerence by refusing to release water to their downstream neighbors than by releasing it too quickly and without notice, as North Korea did here.