The green revolution and globalized food markets were supposed to relegate food scarcity to the annals of history. Yet thousands of people across dozens of countries took to the streets when world food prices spiked in 2008 and 2011. Why, in the 21st century, do people feel compelled to risk life and limb to protest when food prices rise? What do they achieve, and is it more than can be won through constitutional or other legal guarantees of a right to food?
To answer these questions, researchers studied the historical rupture in the global food system between 2007 and 2012. Most studies of food riots in this period took a wide approach, studying correlations with price changes and regime types. We felt this risked treating these events as the spasmodic outbursts of hungry people. Studies of European food riots had established that historically these were ideological and strategic forms of political protest. We decided to go deep, to compare protests, movements and policy responses in selected cases—Bangladesh, India, Kenya and Mozambique. We talked to activists and protestors, studied newspaper coverage, and interviewed key policy elites.
We found that food riots still happen in the 21st century because they still perform important functions in influencing the policies and practices of governments towards subsistence—what we call the ‘politics of provisions’. A popular protest over price alerts governments to impending subsistence crises or the limits of popular tolerance to sudden food price rise. Such protests remind governments that they are responsible for protecting citizens against such crises; for most rulers, the shame of food riots hitting the headlines is incentive enough to elicit some kind of response. They also highlight the plight of groups who fall out of whatever social safety net is there to protect people (one reason Bangladeshi garments workers protested when food prices spiked in 2008 and 2011). Finally, food riots signal popular outrage about food market and food policy failures; for example, speculative hoarding, withdrawn subsidies (which triggered riots in Maputo), or corruption in public food schemes (which did the same in West Bengal).
