The answer is: far more than you might imagine. For one thing, that loaf can be "read" as if it were a core sample extracted from the heart of a grim global economy. Looked at another way, it reveals some of the crucial fault lines of world politics, including the origins of the Arab spring that has now become a summer of discontent. 
 
 Consider this: between June 2010 and June 2011, world grain prices almost doubled. In many places on this planet, that proved an unmitigated catastrophe. In those same months, several governments fell, rioting broke out in cities from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, to Nairobi, Kenya, and most disturbingly three new wars began in Libya, Yemen, and Syria. Even on Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, Bedouin tribes are now in revolt against the country's interim government and manning their own armed roadblocks. 
 
 And in each of these situations, the initial trouble was traceable, at least in part, to the price of that loaf of bread. If these upheavals were not "resource conflicts" in the formal sense of the term, think of them at least as bread-triggered upheavals. 
 
 Growing Climate Change in a Wheat Field 
 
 Bread has classically been known as the staff of life. In much of the world, you can't get more basic, since that daily loaf often stands between the mass of humanity and starvation. Still, to read present world politics from a loaf of bread, you first have to ask: of what exactly is that loaf made? Water, salt, and yeast, of course, but mainly wheat, which means when wheat prices increase globally, so does the price of that loaf -- and so does trouble. 
 
 To imagine that there's nothing else in bread, however, is to misunderstand modern global agriculture. Another key ingredient in our loaf -- call it a "factor of production" -- is petroleum. Yes, crude oil, which appears in our bread as fertilizer and tractor fuel. Without it, wheat wouldn't be produced, processed, or moved across continents and oceans. 
 
 And don't forget labor. It's an ingredient in our loaf, too, but not perhaps in the way you might imagine. After all, mechanization has largely displaced workers from the field to the factory. Instead of untold thousands of peasants planting and harvesting wheat by hand, industrial workers now make tractors and threshers, produce fuel, chemical pesticides, and nitrogen fertilizer, all rendered from petroleum and all crucial to modern wheat growing. If the labor power of those workers is transferred to the wheat field, it happens in the form of technology. Today, a single person driving a huge $400,000 combine, burning 200 gallons of fuel daily, guided by computers and GPS satellite navigation, can cover 20 acres an hour, and harvest 8,000 to 10,000 bushels of wheat in a single day. 
 
 Next, without financial capital -- money -- our loaf of bread wouldn't exist. It's necessary to purchase the oil, the fertilizer, that combine, and so on. But financial capital may indirectly affect the price of our loaf even more powerfully. When there is too much liquid capital moving through the global financial system, speculators start to bid-up the price of various assets, including all the ingredients in bread. This sort of speculation naturally contributes to rising fuel and grain prices. 
 
 The final ingredients come from nature: sunlight, oxygen, water, and nutritious soil, all in just the correct amounts and at just the right time. And there's one more input that can't be ignored, a different kind of contribution from nature: climate change, just now really kicking in, and increasingly the key destabilizing element in bringing that loaf of bread disastrously to market. 
 
 Marketing Disaster 
 
 When these ingredients mix in a way that sends the price of bread soaring, politics enters the picture. Consider this, for instance: The upheavals in Egypt lay at the heart of the Arab Spring. Egypt is also the world's single largest wheat importer, followed closely by Algeria and Morocco. Keep in mind as well that the Arab Spring started in Tunisia when rising food prices, high unemployment, and a widening gap between rich and poor triggered deadly riots and finally the flight of the country's autocratic ruler Zine Ben Ali. His last act was a vow to reduce the price of sugar, milk, and bread -- and it was too little too late. 
 
 With that, protests began in Egypt and the Algerian government ordered increased wheat imports to stave off growing unrest over food prices. As global wheat prices surged by 70 percent between June and December 2010, bread consumption in Egypt started to decline under what economists termed "price rationing." And that price kept rising all through the spring of 2011. By June, wheat cost 83 percent more than it had a year before. During the same time frame, corn prices surged by a staggering 91 percent. Egypt is the world's fourth largest corn importer. When not used to make bread, corn is often employed as a food additive and to feed poultry and livestock. Algeria, Syria, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia are among the top 15 corn importers. As those wheat and corn prices surged, it was not just the standard of living of the Egyptian poor that was threatened, but their very lives as climate-change driven food prices triggered political violence. 
 
 In Egypt, food is a volatile political issue. After all, one in five Egyptians live on less than $1 a day and the government provides subsidized bread to 14.2 million people in a population of 83 million. Last year, overall food-price inflation in Egypt was running at more than 20 percent. This had an instant and devastating impact on Egyptian families, who spend on average 40 percent of their often exceedingly meager monthly incomes simply feeding themselves. 
 
 Against this backdrop, World Bank President Robert Zoellick fretted that the global food system was "one shock away from a full-fledged crisis." And if you want to trace that near full-fledged crisis back to its environmental roots, the place to look is climate change, the increasingly extreme and devastating weather being experienced across this planet. 
 
 When it comes to bread, it went like this: In the summer of 2010, Russia, one of the world's leading wheat exporters, suffered its worst drought in 100 years. Known as the Black Sea Drought, this extreme weather triggered fires that burnt down vast swathes of Russian forests, bleached farmlands, and damaged the country's breadbasket wheat crop so badly that its leaders (urged on by western grain speculators) imposed a year-long ban on wheat exports. As Russia is among the top four wheat exporters in any year, this caused prices to surge upward. 
 
 At the same time, massive flooding occurred in Australia, another significant wheat exporter, while excessive rains in the American Midwest and Canada damaged corn production. Freakishly massive flooding in Pakistan, which put some 20 percent of that country under water, also spooked markets and spurred on the speculators. 
 
 And that's when those climate-driven prices began to soar in Egypt. The ensuing crisis, triggered in part by that rise in the price of our loaf of bread, led to upheaval and finally the fall of the country's reigning autocrat Hosni Mubarak. Tunisia and Egypt helped trigger a crisis that led to an incipient civil war and then western intervention in neighboring Libya, which meant most of that country's production of 1.4 million barrels of oil a day went off-line. That, in turn, caused the price of crude oil to surge, at its height hitting $125 a barrel, which set off yet more speculation in food markets, further driving up grain prices. 
 
 And recent months haven't brought much relief. Once again, significant, in some cases record, flooding has damaged crops in Canada, the United States, and Australia. Meanwhile, an unexpected spring drought in northern Europe has hurt grain crops as well. The global food system is visibly straining, if not snapping, under the intense pressure of rising demand, rising energy prices, growing water shortages, and most of all the onset of climate chaos. 
 
 And this, the experts tell us, is only the beginning. The price of our loaf of bread is forecast to increase by up to 90 percent over the next 20 years. That will mean yet more upheavals, more protest, greater desperation, heightened conflicts over water, increased migration, roiling ethnic and religious violence, banditry, civil war, and (if past history is any judge) possibly a raft of new interventions by imperial and possibly regional powers. 
 
 And how are we responding to this gathering crisis? Has there been a broad new international initiative focused on ensuring food security for the global poor -- that is to say, a stable, affordable price for our loaf of bread? You already know the sad answer to that question. 
 
 Instead, massive corporations like Glencore, the world's largest commodity trading company, and the privately held and secretive Cargill, the world's biggest trader of agricultural commodities, are moving to further consolidate their control of world grain markets and vertically integrate their global supply chains in a new form of food imperialism designed to profit off global misery. While bread triggered war and revolution in the Middle East, Glencore made windfall profits on the surge in grain prices. And the more expensive our loaf of bread becomes the more money firms like Glencore and Cargill stand to make. Consider that just about the worst possible form of "adaptation" to the climate crisis. 
 
 So what text should flash through our brains when reading our loaf of bread? A warning, obviously. But so far, it seems, a warning ignored. 
 
 To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here. 
 
 Christian Parenti, author of the just-published "Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence" (Nation Books), is a contributing editor at the Nation magazine, a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute, and a visiting scholar at the City University of New York. ||||| (CNN) -- The president of South Africa lashed out Tuesday at NATO's enforcement of the U.N. resolution authorizing the organization to act to protect innocent civilians threatened by Libya's civil war. 
 
 "We strongly believe that the resolution is being abused for regime change, political assassinations and foreign military occupation," said Jacob Zuma at a budget vote debate before the National Assembly in Cape Town. 
 
 "These actions undermine the efforts of the African Union in finding solutions to the problems facing its member states," he said in an appeal that called on all parties to respect international humanitarian law and called further for reform of the U.N. Security Council. 
 
 When the council adopted the resolution in March, it was backed by the Arab League and supported by African countries in the council. But Zuma said NATO's actions have exceeded the authority that the resolution granted. 
 
 Arab Spring unrest, country by country 
 
 
 
 "We have spoken out against the misuse of the good intentions in Resolution 1973," said Zuma, who led two African Union delegations to Libya, where he met with leader Moammar Gadhafi in failed attempts to broker a cease-fire. 
 
 Unlike some other world leaders, Zuma has not called for the longtime leader to step down. Neither has Zuma's African National Congress party nor the African Union, which he was representing and which Gadhafi once led. 
 
 The AU also has criticized the NATO airstrikes. 
 
 In April, Zuma led an AU delegation to Tripoli, Libya's capital, where hopes were raised briefly when it was announced that Gadhafi had agreed, in principle, to the AU's "road map" proposal for peace. 
 
 But Gadhafi continued his attacks and the Libyan opposition rejected the proposal because it did not meet its demand that he give up the power he has held for 42 years. 
 
 U.S. officials and those of some other countries have called for Gadhafi to step down. 
 
 Separately, NATO refused to say Tuesday whether it would bomb ancient Roman ruins in Libya if it knew Gadhafi was hiding military equipment there. 
 
 Time magazine gallery: Libya's stunning Roman ruins 
 
 
 
 "We will strike military vehicles, military forces, military equipment or military infrastructure that threaten Libyan civilians as necessary," a NATO official in Naples, Italy, said, declining to give his name in discussing internal NATO deliberations. 
 
 But he said the alliance could not verify rebel claims that Libya's leader may be hiding rocket launchers at the UNESCO World Heritage site of Leptis Magna, a Roman city between the capital of Tripoli and rebel-held Misrata. 
 
 Wing Cmdr. Mike Bracken, a spokesman for NATO's Libya mission, later said it "would be a concern for us that Gadhafi and pro-Gadhafi forces would choose to contravene international law in hiding themselves in such a location." 
 
 And, he said, "If we were to take on any targets, we would consider all risks." But he underscored that NATO could not confirm that weapons might be placed at the heritage site. 
 
 The Bracken briefing came a day after a top British military officer acknowledged that the bombing campaign was straining British resources. 
 
 "If we do it for longer than six months, then we have to reprioritize our forces," Adm. Mark Stanhope said Monday. 
 
 "That does not mean we won't be doing it," he added. 
 
 NATO recently extended its mission -- officially to protect civilians in Libya from Gadhafi's efforts to crush an uprising that has left rebels in control of parts of the country -- for another 90 days, into September. 
 
 British Minister of Defense Liam Fox said Tuesday that the Libya mission showed "how capable we are" and emphasized that the United Kingdom has the world's fourth-largest military budget. 
 
 Concerns over British capabilities were voiced as concern mounted in Washington about U.S. President Barack Obama's failure to seek the approval of Congress for the U.S. military action in Libya. 
 
 "I think he should," Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, told CNN's "Situation Room" on Tuesday. 
 
 Boehner: Possible violation of War Powers act? 
 
 
 
 Asked whether Obama was violating the law by not having sought a formal authorization, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee said, "I think that you could make that argument, but it's also true that other presidents have ignored the War Powers Act in one way or another." 
 
 Still, any prohibition of ground troops would be not only inappropriate but unconstitutional, the decorated Vietnam War veteran added. "I believe that, if the Republicans continue to push such a thing, it could be viewed as partisanship in my view, because no one, no one believes that we are going to send ground troops into Libya. So, to have a, quote, prohibition for that could only mean that we are somehow taking shots at the president." 
 
 He predicted that the White House would send to Congress a report "and lots of information about what we've done" in the next day or so. 
 
 National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor said late Tuesday that the information would probably be delivered to members of Congress on Wednesday. 
 
 "We are in the final stages of preparing extensive information for the House and Senate that will address a whole host of issues about our ongoing efforts in Libya, including those raised in the House resolution as well as our legal analysis with regard to the War Powers Resolution," he said. 
 
 Also Tuesday, Germany's foreign minister visited the de facto rebel capital of Benghazi, and rebels reported progress against government forces in western mountain cities. 
 
 Guido Westerwelle said Germany had formally recognized the rebel Transitional National Council as the representative of the Libyan people, putting Berlin in line with the United States, France, Italy and a handful of other countries. 
 
 CNN's Brent Swails, Damien Ward, Laura Perez Maestro, Salma Abdelaziz, Frederik Pleitgen and Kareem Khadder contributed to this story.
– Libyan rebels say Moammar Gadhafi is hiding weapons at a UNESCO World Heritage site—and if arms are there, NATO won’t "rule out" bombing it, CNN reports. "We will strike military vehicles, military forces, military equipment or military infrastructure that threaten Libyan civilians as necessary,” said a NATO official, who could not confirm the rebel claims. So what is this place? Salon provides an overview of Leptis Magna, a site UNESCO says was one of the Roman Empire’s “most beautiful cities.” Its port, UNESCO notes, was “one of the chefs d'oeuvre of Roman technology.” Leptis Magna began as a Phoenician city around 1000 BCE. The emperor Septimius Severus, who ruled from the years 193 to 211, was born there and greatly expanded it. It eventually entered Byzantine and then Arab hands, and has been a ruin for some 2,000 years. It’s “one of the best preserved Roman cities," says a British archeologist, but it has "attracted less attention” thanks to Libya’s “political situation.” Click through for some impressive photos of Leptis Magna.