The Psychology of Food Riots
When Do Price Spikes Lead to Unrest?
Article Summary and Author Biography
The connection among rising prices, hunger, and violent civic unrest seems intuitively logical. But there was more to Tunisia's food protests than the logic of the pocketbook. The psychological element -- a sense of injustice that arises between seeing food prices rise and pouring a Molotov cocktail -- is more important.
EVAN FRASER is Canada Research Chair in Global Human Security at the University of Guelph. ANDREW RIMAS is Editor of Improper Bostonian. They are the authors of Empires of Food: Feast Famine and the Rise and Fall of Civilization.
Snapshot
Last week's mass protests in Tunisia were less a symptom of economic malaise than of a society fed up with its broken dictatorship. Should the other autocratic regimes in the Middle East and North Africa be afraid?
This article appears in the Foreign Affairs/CFR eBook, The New Arab Revolt.
Snapshot
For years, Arab dictators used food subsidies -- and cheap bread -- to keep their subjects quiet. But when prices rose, the very thing that regimes used to ensure obedience became a symbol and a source of revolution.
This article appears in the Foreign Affairs/CFR eBook, The New Arab Revolt.
The year 2010 was a tough one for the global food system. Wildfires, fueled by record temperatures and a summer drought, burned away much of Russia's wheat harvest, spurring the Kremlin to halt exports. Throughout the fall, commodities prices skyrocketed. The United Nations panicked and called an emergency summit in September. World food prices rose to a record high in December 2010. So far, 2011 has not been much better: in January, food prices were identified as one trigger for Tunisia's unrest as well as for riots across much of northern Africa, including Egypt, a country that depends heavily on Russian grain. It seems that a food crisis along the lines of the one in 2008, when rioters in dozens of countries furiously protested the price of grain, might again be in the works.
Assuming a connection among rising prices, hunger, and violent civic unrest seems logical. Many commentators have emphasized it, including Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, who warned of mass starvation and other "dire consequences" if food prices were allowed to rise too high: "As we know . . . those kinds of questions sometimes end in war." For its part, the UN emergency summit last fall concluded with a reminder of the pledge taken during the 2009 World Food Summit: Countries must "refrain from taking measures that are inconsistent with the [World Trade Organization] rules." In other words, the UN reaffirmed that free trade and increased agricultural production are the best means to achieve food security...
