Introduction
The issue of food security is often viewed from the perspective of environmental sustainability, agricultural efficiency, or economic development. However, food security is also increasingly a political issue, as large portions of the population move from farms to cities and rely increasingly on international food markets for access to food. International food markets are very volatile, though, causing much of the world to be food insecure, without a dependable source for this necessity. When tensions over food security rise, poor populations often turn to protest to voice their grievances to government officials, who they view as responsible for ensuring access to food. These grievances, however, are rarely just about food, as unequal access to food is merely a symptom of the larger systemic issues of political and economic inequality. Scholars often treat food riots as phenomenon outside of the democratic political sphere and view them as isolated instances of violence; however, with closer examination, one can see that food riots are an expression of political voice by the powerless. In order to investigate this argument, I will examine the structural causes of inequality and the strategies identified for structural change, the gradual opening of the national and international economies and its effect on food security, and the way in which protest around food security corresponds to general political grievances around inequality and poor governance. Thus, the argument follows that, sparked by the moral economy of food, food riots are an expression by the population of their overall grievances of poor governance and inequality, and when layered on top of existing resistance networks and repertoires of protest, can evolve into revolutionary movements for political change.
Structural Inequality
Charles Tilly (1998) argues that inequalities among a population correspond to the way socially recognized, institutionalized categorical differences are utilized to justify the uneven distribution of resources. (C. Tilly 1998, 7) The mechanisms of inequality operate through the collective experience and social interaction, as social transactions cluster into social ties, which coalesce into networks that constrain solutions of organizational problems. (C. Tilly 1998, 21-25) Bounded categories help solve organizational problems through categorical distinction, allowing the powerful to exclude less powerful groups from the full benefits of society. (C. Tilly 1998, 7-8) In this way, socially constructed categorical distinctions determine the way food is distributed throughout a society. The social distinction between the rich and the poor is the most obvious category used to manage access to food, however, that category has also likely emerged from more fundamental distinctions of race, ethnic, cultural, and gender differences. Charles Tilly (1998) also argues that resources vary in the extent to which their value is derived either autonomously in relation to other resources, or relative to their value to create or maintain categorical inequality with respect to autonomous goods. (C. Tilly 1998, 26-27) As an autonomous good, food gains its value from the benefit it provides through nutrition, but its unequal distribution is also affected by the influence of relative goods on the power of individuals to distinguish which category receives its benefit. In addition, Charles Tilly (1998) argues that nutrition provides a useful model for categorical inequality, since feeding differs between categories and the cumulative effects elsewhere help to explain current differences. (C. Tilly 1998, 3-7) Although bounded categories facilitate the unequal distribution of resources, they also provide a mechanism around which the less powerful can organize to capture those benefits. (C. Tilly 1998, 7-8) The efforts of the disadvantaged in this system to introduce certain new advantageous organizational forms can have a great impact on the structure and durability of inequality. (C. Tilly 1998, 16)
The distributional inequality created through the categorization of the rich and the poor is institutionalized on an individual, state, and international level through the global capitalist system. Connolly (2011) argues that capitalism requires control over all aspects of life, including family, religion, academia, law, civil society, and history, in order to facilitate the oppression of others to ensure the extraction of surplus value and the balance of consumption with production. (Connolly 2011, 126) The over-specialization of work narrows the horizons of laborers, while the expansion of consumption needs transitions people from the ways of traditional life into the role of consumer, rewarding the virtue of self-reliance. (Connolly 2011, 124) Thus, as the production of food has become privatized, individuals are removed from their traditional ways of growing and preparing food, and relegated to mere consumers, instead reliant on their labor and corporate producers for sustenance. In addition, the management of cross-regional relations by a hegemonic capitalist state institutionalizes inequality on an international level through the historically asymmetrical modes of political, economic, social, and cultural exchange within and between regions. (Connolly 2011, 131) Connolly (2011) argues that this global “abstract machine” is a cluster of diverse elements that enter into loose, evolving, and re-enforcing relations, exceeding the control of those entangled in it. (Connolly 2011, 135) Thus, the capitalist system and its components interact to produce the self-fulfilling phenomenon in which “the impoverished are the product of a system that blames them for their impoverishment rather than treating it as a curse of fate.” (Connolly 2011, 124-125)
However, similar to Charles Tilly’s argument, the global abstract machine both institutionalizes inequality and provides space for resistance to that institutionalization. “The rapid assumptions [actors] must make about regime stability, natural processes, resource bases, and the transparency of other participants means that the system is highly volatile and filled with objective uncertainties,” which when combined with the speed at which investors can affect the expansion of global speculation, results in suffering and violence. (Connolly 2011, 135) “Dissonant forces, drawing upon competitive practices of sovereignty, resentments tied to uneven exchange, speculative practices beyond the reach of those affected, and a regional division of dominant religious institutions become condensed into a global resonance machine of cross-regional class antagonisms.” (Connolly 2011, 138) Opposed parties act in ways that spur those of the opposition to respond, activating contentious forces and shifting them in new ways. (Connolly 2011, 142) In regards to food, the volatility and uncertainty of food prices, combined with elite control over food distribution and the powerlessness of the population, lead to contention between the governing elites and the poor. Connolly (2011) describes how individuals are linked to the machine through their various roles in society. Roles play a unique part in the functioning of the machine as “a role is neither reducible entirely to the individuals who inhabit it, nor thoroughly assimilable to the larger assemblages that help to shape and manage it.” (Connolly 2011, 143) Multiple roles, thus, accumulate change in practices and contribute to turning the machine in a different direction with their cumulative effects. (Connolly 2011, 144) Thus, by altering one’s actions within the context of their social roles, for instance the governed and the governors, one can alter the way in which the machine defines categories and the resources distributed to them.
The cumulative influence of role alteration on social change is also illustrated through the phenomenon of transposition and diffusion of cultural frameworks among social movements. Haydu (2011) argues that cultural scripts from outside institutions and movements can account for many of the differences between similar movements in their “framing of choices, their democratizing impulse, their conception of the relationship between personal change and social reform, their boundary work, and their tactical choices.” (Haydu 2011, 481) Transposition involves the application of borrowed cultural scripts to new problems, shaping social movements and reproducing cultural logics in new fields. (Haydu 2011, 464) In addition, “diffusion through cultural transposition is more likely when individual biographies, social networks, and organizational settings cross social fields.” (Haydu 2011, 471) Thus, the cumulative effects of role alteration in one social movement or institution influence the direction, strategies, tactics, and reproduction of other movements an institutions, increasing the degree of change possible in Connolly’s (2011) Resonance Machine of Global Antagonism. In addition, Haydu (2011) identified this phenomenon in eras in which lengthening commodity chains, new methods of food production, and the commoditization of food increased food insecurity for consumers who made demands for alternative food sources in an environment of increasing social movement activity. (Haydu 2011, 468)
Moral Economy
When the effect of structural inequality is amplified through institutional shifts in the economy, the effects of those shifts can result in subsistence crises for the poor. Louise Tilly (1971) argues that food riots in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France can best be explained in terms of changing governmental policy in the marketing of grain, specifically, the movement toward political centralization, the national concentration of economic policy decisions, a modification of paternalistic economic policy, and the formation of a national market. (L. A. Tilly 1971, 25) Traditionally, the government intervened in the market by fixing the price of bread to the price of wheat, encouraging competition and regulating trade to keep prices low, buying and storing surplus wheat to distribute during shortages, and through requisitions, including the investigations of supplies, attempts to force grain onto markets, and buying and dumping grain in an attempt to lower price levels. (L. A. Tilly 1971, 30-35) However, economic shifts during the time shifted the control of the economy from the state to the free market. Physiocratic economic theories “called for the complete elimination of limits on who could trade, the removal of market regulations, and the extension of freedom to external trade.” (L. A. Tilly 1971, 33) Increased demand from the military, and the growth of cities and overseas markets led to the expansion of local markets and consolidation of the national market. (L. A. Tilly 1971, 36) Food riots emerged, not where food shortages occurred, but in large market areas where demand increased, and borrowed from previous repertoires of protest and demands for improved governance. (L. A. Tilly 1971, 57-58) Thus, the food riot nationalized and politicized subsistence issues and centered on the ideal of how the economy should work. (L. A. Tilly 1971, 57-58)
Similar subsistence crises have also occurred more recently as economic shifts are implemented to integrate national markets of developing countries further into to a more liberal globalized economy. Patel and McMichael (2009) argue that agribusiness and food aid reshaped the diets of urban consumers in newly industrialized developing countries while also driving peasants to urban centers through dispossession. (Patel and McMichael 2009, 15) The corporate food regime combines state power, the world price weapon, and corporate sourcing strategies to displace the staple foods of national economies with exports. (Patel and McMichael 2009, 16-18) Through the recent liberalization of their national markets, Western aid was able to subsidize commercial mono-cropping by Western agribusiness in developing countries, transforming rural landscapes and dispossessing peasants, who in 2007-2008 were the victims of skyrocketing food prices in urban centers. (Patel and McMichael 2009, 16) The response of agribusiness and futures speculation to market demands and public subsidies for biofuels, contributed to the spike in food prices in 2007-2008, which disproportionately effected subsistence farmers and the new urban working poor, who in response expressed their discontent through food riots. (Patel and McMichael 2009, 19-20) These food riots, thus, politicized hunger and were a direct challenge to the politics of food commodities produced under near-monopoly conditions distributed through the global market by Western agribusiness. (Patel and McMichael 2009, 24) They were not just initiated by the lack of access to food, but also by the expectation that the government should control policy in order to protect food security.
The actions taken by the government and economic elites to consolidate the food market were at the expense of the poor, who were forced to give up control over their food source and become dependent on the market of food, but when that dependent relationship is violated, the poor act out in outrage and desperation. Louise Tilly (1971) credits moral economy with the emergence of the food riots in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. (L. A. Tilly 1971, 45-47) The moral economy “is a traditional view of the social role of government and the proper economic roles of producers, consumers, merchants, and officials.” (L. A. Tilly 1971, 46) In France during this time of economic change, the population expected the government to take its traditional role to regulate the market to keep bread prices low, maintain the market supply by requisitioning grain when necessary, and prioritize local grain needs before transporting it to other markets. (L. A. Tilly 1971, 46-47) However, these expectations were routinely challenged as increased demand from the military, cities, and overseas increased local grain prices, local grain was transported on a large scale to accommodate the nationalization of the market, and local officials failed to take action to reverse these trends. (L. A. Tilly 1971, 47-52) In response, the population resorted to traditional forms of resistance to voice their grievances, the taxation populare of bread to demand government price-setting, and entraves to stop the transport of grain supply outside of local markets. (L. A. Tilly 1971, 47-52) Louise Tilly (1971) stresses, however, that it was not the long-term trend in the price of bread or the prevalence of hunger that spurred protest, but the population’s grievance around government policy. (L. A. Tilly 1971, 24-25) Thus, the moral economy of food sparked the forms of popular resistance seen in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France in response to the nationalization and liberalization of the economy. This response from peasants to the actions of the government is also an example of efforts of the less powerful to alter the unequal distribution of resources among social categories as described by Charles Tilly (1998).
The outrage expressed by the population differs, however, depending on the nature of expectation and the avenues available for political expression. Patel and McMichael (2009) also contribute the rise of food riots to moral economy as the violation of the population’s expectation of the government to support their survival spurred outrage. (Patel and McMichael 2009, 13) With the monopolization of agribusiness and the dispossession and urbanization of peasants, food inflation in 2007-2008 meant that people could no longer feed their families at the level they previously could due to the globalization of the national economy. (Patel and McMichael 2009, 22) The rearrangement of food distribution by powerful global actors increased inequality and violated the moral economy of the less powerful, who turned to the available repertoire of forms of protest to express their grievances. (Patel and McMichael 2009, 25-27) The governing elite were insulated from the effects of this economic change, whereas the poor were disproportionately affected by the actions of the elite, so with no other voice or power to gain the ear of the government, citizens turned to riots to articulate their political dissatisfaction. (Patel and McMichael 2009, 26-27) Patel and McMichael (2009) differentiate, however, between food riots and IMF riots, which were similarly sparked by the globalization of economies in developing countries. (Patel and McMichael 2009, 9-10) Steep price increases for urban consumers for other commodities twenty years prior were also the result of changes in economic policy in accordance with Western neoliberal policy. (Patel and McMichael 2009, 9) However, although the spike in prices for urban consumers were a result of similar economic policy changes in both cases, the moral economy around other commodities differed from the moral economy of food, and thus IMF riots developed differently than food riots.
The violation of the dependent relationship between the population and the market, spurred the demand for a return to popular sovereignty over the food supply. Patel and McMichael (2009) claim that “while food riots may stem from the political-economy of food security, the protests themselves are agential moments that can, in some cases, be understood as a movement toward an alternative best captured in the term ‘food sovereignty.’” (Patel and McMichael 2009, 11) Food riots are the political expression of the desire for popular control over decisions regarding food policy and the wider economy by those disenfranchised by the corporate food regime. (Patel and McMichael 2009, 29) Food riots are not only a rebellion against high food prices, but also a claim against a powerful class that has failed in its responsibility to provide food security and respond to the needs of working families. (Patel and McMichael 2009, 30) Thus, food riots were not a direct function of food shortage in the economy, but a claim for popular sovereignty over economic decisions and mitigation of the consequences of those decisions. (Patel and McMichael 2009, 12) Food riots ended when elites successfully mitigated the fluctuations of the markets, or the protests evolved into broader demands for economic justice and democratization. (Patel and McMichael 2009, 13) Food riots, therefore, were a form of political expression by the less powerful class that utilized the political space for contention to demand increased equality in the distribution of resources and power over the decisions of that distribution.
Mechanism for Change
Although popular forms of collective action have existed for centuries, the emergence of a formal political space for the grievances of the public against the government emerged only after the emergence of modern democracy. Charles Tilly and Wood (2013) argue that social movements are a distinct form of contentious politics that involve the collective expression of public claims involving the government that, if realized, would conflict with another’s interests. (Tilly and Wood 2013, 3-4) In this sense, food riots would qualify as a form of contentious politics, in that there was a collective demand against the government for the popular sovereignty over food, which conflicts with the interests of agribusiness and international elites. However, groups that already control substantial resources and power, often acquire their rights through direct negotiation with the government, thus social movements are also a democratic political space for less powerful groups to assert the desire for popular sovereignty. (Tilly and Wood 2013, 3-14) Citizens utilize food riots as a way to voice their opposition to government policy because they have no other voice or power in the situation, and often because groups that are more powerful have already asserted their rights through government policy, which then conflict with the rights of less powerful groups. This also illustrates the way in which powerful social categories control the distribution of resources as described by Charles Tilly (1998). In terms of strategy, social movements combine traditional forms of political action into sustained interactive campaigns, utilizing special-purpose associations, public meetings, solemn processions, vigils, rallies, demonstrations, petitions, public media, pamphleteering, and public representation of worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment (WUNC). Tilly and Wood 2013, 4-8) In this sense, food riots themselves are not social movements because they are more of a spontaneous reaction to government policies than an organized and strategic response, but the demands of food riots can often be adopted by established resistance networks, if available, and sustained through popular social movements for economic justice and increased democratization. In fact, as Charles Tilly and Wood (2013) point out, “Once social movements establish themselves in one political setting, modeling, communication, and collaboration facilitate their adoption in other settings.”
Social movements are an example of how the cumulative effect of a change in an individual’s role as a citizen can alter the direction of the global abstract machine. Connolly (2011) argues that a global machine fueled by the interaction of the machine and its constituents can only be changed by altering those interactions through the roles we play. (Connolly 2011, 144-146) Experimentation with individual and group roles opens us up to new experiences that might alter our perspective, help us understand the roles of others, present opportunities for new connections with others, generate large political movements, and enlarge the space and visibility of positive action. (Connolly 2011, 145) Effective role experimentation builds a reserve of public potential for revolutionary action so that one can respond immediately and creatively to new events as they arise, all the while being mindful to the direction in which the machine is being turned. (Connolly 2011, 146) The goal of resistance is to induce cumulative change in individual and group behavior that shifts and influences the direction of the machine, pushing collective roles in new directions, and escalating pressure on social and political institutions. (Connolly 2011, 144) Thus, as individuals were can maintain a potential for change by practicing our ideals in everyday interactions, and spreading these ideals to those around us, so that when our ideals are violated, we are ready to react to the violation in a purposeful and effective way. Food riots are an example of a concerted reaction to the violation of our ideals and a way to utilize our role as a governed population to demand a change in our relation to the government. The existence of previous resistance networks can also absorb the initial reaction and demand for food sovereignty and transform it into a sustained and organized campaign for general social and political change.
Food riots have consistently been a reaction to the government’s failure to protect food security; however, before the emergence of social movements, food riots were limited in scope to food security-specific grievances. Louise Tilly (1971) describes the form resistance took in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France in response to the inequality and oppression felt by the population. (L. A. Tilly 1971, 47-52) In urban areas, citizens rioted against bakers whose prices were too high or loaves were too few, at city residents suspected of hoarding supplies of grain, and at government officials who failed to act swiftly to ease a food shortage. (L. A. Tilly 1971, 23) In rural areas, citizens forcibly prevented wagons and barges loaded with grain from leaving a locality (entraves), and forcibly acquired an inventory of bread and sold it at a price considered just (taxation populare). (L. A. Tilly 1971, 23) Food riots did not generally occur where prices were the highest, but where food security was a high concern, e.g., in productive areas where grain was transported to meet national market demands, and in large cities where the dependence on other regions for grain was great. (L. A. Tilly 1971, 26) These forms, locations, and circumstances for protest became ritualized over the centuries as a way for citizens to express their dissatisfaction with the government’s distributional policies throughout the transition from a paternalistic to a laissez-faire economy and the attainment of a national market. (L. A. Tilly 1971, 54) However, since the food riots during this time in France occurred before the emergence of social movements as identified by Charles Tilly and Wood (2013), it is logical that this reaction by the population to the violation of their ideals did not transform into more general demands for economic justice and social change because there were no previously existing resistance networks available to adopt their demands.
After the emergence of social movements, food riots became more organized and strategic and had the potential to transform into broader movements for social change. Berezneva and Lee (2013) identify the factors that facilitated the emergence of food riots in some African countries, but not others, in response to spikes in food prices in 2007-2008. (Berazneva and Lee 2013, 29) They define the food riots as civil unrest in response to the unavailability and unaffordability of basic food and other staples following an increase in prices that led to violence and casualties. (Berazneva and Lee 2013, 31) The reflection of global price surges in local markets varied due to variations in exchange rate movement, trade policies, transportation costs, and domestic market structure. (Berazneva and Lee 2013, 30) “Riots were not simply chaotic expressions of popular anger, but were generally organized and purposeful political actions” to address short-term problems of scarcity and high prices, and urge local officials to implement relief measures. (Berazneva and Lee 2013, 31) “Given the costliness of policies aimed at buffering such high and rapid rises in food prices and of social programs to protect vulnerable populations, cash-strapped African governments also varied in their response to the crisis.” (Berazneva and Lee 2013, 30) Thus, African citizens responded with violence and civil unrest to the increase in food insecurity they were experiencing and the failure of the government to mitigate the consequences of market volatility. The majority of African countries experiencing food riots were in the early stages of democratization and lacked fully developed governance and civil society institutions. (Berazneva and Lee 2013, 37) Thus, in the short-term, increased democratization and civil society encouraged civil conflict; however, these same factors promote civil liberties and democratic freedoms, and are crucial for securing political and economic stability in the long-term. (Berazneva and Lee 2013, 37) Given that social movements are a political space in which less powerful groups can express their political grievances, it is appropriate that increase democratization would lead to an increase in food riots. However, the extent to which networks of resistance had been established through civil society institutions would determine the extent to which the initial violence of food riots evolved into more organized and sustained campaigns for economic justice and social change. In fact, Berezneva and Lee (2013) note that many of the same factors that led to the food riots in 2007-2008 also led to movements for regime change in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya in 2010-2011. (Berazneva and Lee 2013, 31, 37) As discussed previously, food riots can be the ignition that existing resistance networks co-opt in an effort for increased economic justice and social change, so it is not surprising if food riots led to movements for regime change in Egypt and Tunisia. The questions though become: Why did food riots transform into movements for regime change in Egypt and Tunisia, but not in the other eleven African countries that experienced food riots? How did the government’s response to the food riots influence the trajectory of the transformation from food riot to movement for regime change? And, why did Libya experience a movement for regime change in 2010-2011, but not the proceeding food riots in 2007-2008 if the same influencing factors were present?
Conclusion
Given that inequality is institutionalized through the unequal distribution of resources by powerful groups to powerless groups, inequality becomes prevalent in all roles and institutions over time, making it difficult to address on a case-by-case basis. Inequality and power relations are so intertwined in the political, economic, and social structures that there is little room in which to maneuver change. Social movements, however, have been identified as a political space in democracies for those without power to exert change on the structure, and although reactions of violence and outrage were present around issues of inequality in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the emergence of organized and sustained social movement campaigns in the late eighteenth century as a tool for democratic change allowed this outrage to be expressed in a constructive way within the political sphere. In fact, the existence of social movement networks greatly increased the power and voice of the disadvantaged by providing a ready reserve of action for the effective and timely response to the unjust actions of powerful elites.
Throughout history as governments and economic institutions shifted the nature of the economy to better benefit their interests, the resulting consequences were disproportionately felt by the poor and powerless. Without a voice or influence in policy-making, the poor and powerless expressed their grievances by using their numbers to incite targeted violence against those responsible for the immediate causes of their dissatisfaction, which is often focused around their access to food. As Patel and McMichael (2009) state, “not only is the food riot one of the oldest forms of collective action, it is also the moment in which economic and political injustice reaches a tipping point – arguably because food is the most elemental material symbol of the social contract.” (Patel and McMichael 2009, 23) Thus, food insecurity is often the ignition for expressions of general grievances of inequality, oppression, and poor governance. Other resources crucial to survival have similar ignition power, as seen in the IMF riots, however the intrinsic permeation of food in social, cultural, and economic life, politicizes food and increases its moral economy, as increasingly urbanized and dependent populations rely on governments and markets to provide access to food. When the expectations of these populations are violated, they turn to their provider, the government, to make their grievances known in the only way they know how.
Scholars often categorize food riots as a unique form of popular resistance, but when examined closely, the structure of food riots exhibit little difference from other generalized forms of protest. However, given the increasingly political nature of food, food riots will never be just about food. Unequal access to food is a symptom of broad political and economic inequalities, and when pushed to a breaking point, exposes the population’s general grievances of oppression and poor governance that have been bubbling under the surface and finally explode under the added pressure of hunger.
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