Let Them Eat Bread
How Food Subsidies Prevent (and Provoke) Revolutions in the Middle East
Article Summary and Author Biography
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.
ANNIA CIEZADLO is the author of Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War. She has reported from the Middle East as a special correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor and The New Republic.
Snapshot
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.
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.
For two days, people poured into the streets of Cairo, burning buses and trams, government buildings, and expensive cars. In Tahrir Square, troops fired tear gas at the demonstrators. Cairenes cheered from balconies and rooftops while their comrades in the streets below chanted antigovernment slogans: "You dress in the latest fashions," they roared at their president, "while we sleep 12 to a room!"
It was 1977, and revolution was in the air. When an already unpopular government tried to rescind food subsidies -- meaning massive price increases for staples like bread, rice, and cooking gas -- riots erupted. By the time they were over, hundreds of buildings were burned, 160 people were dead, and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat had learned an essential lesson for the modern Arab dictator: let them eat bread. Lots of cheap bread.
Change is sweeping through the Middle East today, but one thing remains the same: the region once known as the Fertile Crescent is now the world's most dependent on imported grain. Of the top 20 wheat importers for 2010, almost half are Middle Eastern countries. The list reads like a playbook of toppled and teetering regimes: Egypt (1), Algeria (4), Iraq (7), Morocco (8), Yemen (13), Saudi Arabia (15), Libya (16), Tunisia (17).
For decades, many of these regimes relied on food subsidies to ensure stability -- a social contract so pervasive that the Tunisian scholar Larbi Sadiki described it as dimuqratiyyat al-khubz, or "democracy of bread." But over the past several years, grain prices reached record levels, and these appeasement policies lost their luster. In Tunisia, pro-democracy demonstrations began in late December 2010 with protesters brandishing baguettes. In just a few months, a wave of uprisings rippled across the region, toppling Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt's longtime ruler, Hosni Mubarak...
