About 7 million of Tunisia’s 10.4 million people are eligible to vote.

There was a festive atmosphere throughout the day in the capital, Tunis, where primary schools converted into polling stations received the streams of voters across the city and from all walks of life.

Young men waved Tunisia’s red and white flag from the windows of honking cars on the capital’s streets. Blue ink, administered at election booths to indicate a person had voted, stained the fingers of men and women, young and old alike.

“Whatever the result, I feel like I exist,” a smiling Hamid Lofti, 35, said outside a polling station after he voted in central Tunis.

Despite deep divisions among the various political parties over Tunisia’s future — the most contentious being the debate between secularists and Islamists — the election itself was a source of both national and regional pride for many Tunisians on Sunday.

This tiny North African nation was the first in the Arab world to topple its dictator, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, through a popular revolt in January. Now, it is the first to hold successful democratic elections with zero violence and only minor voting violations, observers said.

“I feel so proud to be Tunisian,” said 22-year-old Qais Jelassi, who participated in the protests in Tunis that forced Ben Ali from power. “I never thought that this [free elections] would be the result of our demonstrations.”

Indeed, the process was smooth, transparent and organized, voters said. Nearly 50,000 elections workers, including 5,000 trained and accredited observers, were deployed to polling booths across the country.

Special stations were opened to accommodate citizens who had not yet registered to vote — but who could still register on the day of the election.

A text message service enabled voters to send their national identification numbers to a central hotline, which would reply with the name and address of their designated polling station.

“I thought I was registered in one place but they sent me to another voting station. It was frustrating,”said 42-year-old Olfa Bormeya, an unveiled, female lawyer in an upper-middle class neighborhood in Tunis.

Voters at at least four other polling stations in the city, however, voiced almost no other complaints.

Even in Tunis’s most impoverished and densely-populated neighborhood, Hay al-Tadamon, voters were cheerful and crowded the election halls well into the evening.

Polls were slated to close at 7 p.m., and at 6 p.m., as dark fell over the slum, local stations were still buzzing with activity.

“I voted for the first time, and no one told me who to vote for. It was of my own free will,”said 54-year-old Tounis Bouzazi, a veiled resident of Hay al-Tadamon.

She voted for Karama, an independent list of candidates, dismissing the popular Islamist party, Ennahda, as two-faced.

Ennahda, formed from a grassroots Islamic organization that was banned under Ben Ali, is the favorite to win Sunday’s polls.

Its experience and organization has won it followers across Tunisia, and particularly for its populist campaigns in the countryside.

Ennahda leaders insist they are not interested in turning Tunisia into a strict Islamic emirate, but secular Tunisians are worried the party will roll back the country’s progressive legislation regarding the rights of women and the liberal style of Islam that is practiced here.

Ennahda’s most likely contester for the most seats in the assembly, the secular Progressive Democratic Party (PDP), was polling at just 15 percent in the days before the election.

“If Ennahda wins, I would like to see sharia [Islamic] law,” said Tawfiq bin Mohammed bin Abdullah, a 62-year-old Ennahda supporter.”There are many women in Tunisia who do not know true Islam. Ennahda will not impose, but it will explain what it is in the Koran. And hopefully they will come to the true Islam.”

Others are drawn to Ennahda not only for its religious message, but for its longer history as a serious opposition group.

“Ennahda, they want to preserve our civil rights,”said 22-year-old Khalil Elalmi, a medical student who was arrested and beaten during the revolution.”They want to preserve our rights and take into consideration the law of Islam.”

“Their objective is to help people get a better life.”

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.

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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.

Ben Ali, 74, vigorously denied the charges in a statement through his French lawyer, calling the proceedings a “shameful masquerade of the justice of the victorious.”

Saudi Arabia did not respond to an extradition request, and some Tunisians expressed frustration that he would not be present for his judgment.

Ben Ali and his wife were charged in the discovery of a trove of valuable jewels and cash in Tunisian and foreign currency at a palace in a village north of Tunis. Images of the cache shown on TV after the discovery shocked Tunisians.

A second case stems from the seizure of arms and drugs at the official presidential palace in Carthage during a search by a commission investigating abuse of authority formed after Ben Ali’s departure. He faced charges in that case of possessing and trafficking drugs, detention of arms and munitions and failing to declare archaeological works also found at the palace.

Ben Ali, 74, vigorously denied the charges in a statement through his French lawyer, calling the proceedings a “shameful masquerade of the justice of the victorious.”

Five public defenders have been assigned to Ben Ali and his wife, Leila Trabelsi, who is accused in one of the two cases in Monday’s trial. Tunisian law prohibits a foreign lawyer from defending a client in absentia, judicial officials said, meaning French lawyer Jean-Yves Le Borgne cannot take part in proceedings.

Saudi Arabia did not respond to an extradition request, and some Tunisians expressed frustration that he would not be present for his judgment. A verdict could come later Monday.

Ben Ali and his wife are charged in the discovery of a trove of valuable jewels and cash in Tunisian and foreign currency at a palace in a village north of Tunis. Images of the cache shown on TV after the discovery shocked Tunisians.

The second case surrounds the seizure of arms and drugs at the official presidential palace in Carthage during a search by a commission investigating abuse of authority formed after Ben Ali’s departure. He faces charges of possessing and trafficking drugs, detention of arms and munitions and failing to declare archaeological works also found at the palace.

If convicted, Ben Ali faces five to 20 years in prison for each offense.

More serious charges, including plotting against the security of the state and murder, will be dealt with at future trials. Judicial authorities say that Ben Ali and his entourage are implicated in 93 civil cases and 182 others that fall under military jurisdiction.

In the statement released by Le Borgne, Ben Ali “vigorously denies” accusations against him, saying he never had huge sums of money and claiming most of the weapons found were gifts from visiting heads of state.

“As for the drugs allegedly found, that is a lie and an ignominy … It is absurd and defamatory,” the statement from the lawyer said. The trial has “no goal but to accuse yesterday’s president.”

“I devoted my life to my country and aspire, at the twilight of my existence, to conserve my honor,” Ben Ali said in the statement.

Backed by his powerful party that controlled all sectors, Ben Ali governed with an iron fist, suppressing dissent and quashing all freedom of expression. An official for the Ministry of State Domains, Mohamed Adel Ben Ismail, evaluates the fortune amassed by Ben Ali and the powerful Trabelsi clan of his widely detested wife at a quarter of the value of the Tunisian economy.

In power for 23 years, Ben Ali’s regime unraveled with a monthlong uprising around the country triggered by the fatal self-immolation of an unemployed man in the rural heartland. That sparked protests that moved through the countryside to Tunis, the capital, and failed to die down despite concessions from the president. In a surprise move, he left for exile.

Ben Ali denied that he fled Tunisia, saying he left to avoid “fratricidal and deadly confrontations” among Tunisians. The statement said he would clarify the circumstances of his departure at an appropriate time.