Food Riots

Social unrest may reflect a variety of factors such as poverty, unemployment, and social injustice. Despite the many possible contributing factors, the timing of violent protests in North Africa and the Middle East in 2011 as well as earlier riots in 2008 coincides with large peaks in global food prices. We identify a specific food price threshold above which protests become likely. These bservations suggest that protests may reflect not only long-standing political failings of governments, but also the sudden desperate straits of vulnerable populations. If food prices remain high, there is likely to be persistent and increasing global social disruption. Underlying the food price peaks we also find an ongoing trend of increasing prices. We extrapolate these trends and identify a crossing point to the domain of high impacts, even without price peaks, in 2012-2013. This implies that avoiding global food crises and associated social unrest requires rapid and concerted action.

In 2008, the international media listed Bangladesh among the low-income countries that saw
food riots during the global food price crisis. The most notable of these events took place in
the pre-monsoon Dhaka heat on 13 April, when workers in the vital export-oriented garments
sector took to the streets in a graphic flash of anger at low pay in a time of high staple food
prices. Around that time, the government of Bangladesh set in motion efforts to stabilise
food prices, to protect those hit hardest by the spike. These efforts were not simple matters:
the crisis was global, not easily managed by a single country government. Meanwhile India,
the main source of Bangladesh’s rice imports, closed its borders to protect its own citizens.
Yet the Bangladesh authorities ultimately succeeded, and their policy choices and the
institutional architecture that made them possible affirmed Bangladesh’
s reputation for an
effective and responsive food (if not nutrition) security policy.
This research set out to find out whether these events were causally related: did these ‘food
riots’ trigger or activate these responsive and effective food security policies in any sense?
The Bangladesh case study (the present paper) is part of a comparative four country study
(including India, Kenya and Mozambique) which aimed to test the proposition that popular
mobilisation – riots or more organised civil society action – engendered public accountability
for hunger during the period of global food price volatility in 2007–12. The proposition was
motivated by a reading of the lessons of European history for the present period of globalised
financial and commodity price volatility. These lessons suggest that during subsistence
crises, food riots were an effective strategy for the relatively powerless masses to hold public
authorities to account, and that they were most common in moments of transition towards
more market-oriented food regimes. For contemporary Bangladesh, we hypothesised that
there were both strong moral economy and powerful political economy reasons to believe
that food riots may have played such a triggering role. Garments workers had the means and
motive to organise. Policymakers and politicians had the incentives and the institutions with
which to respond.
To tackle these issues, the research used a multi-sited research methodology that integrated:
a) catalogues of the numbers and types of protests that occurred, using media content
analysis; b) close-grained case studies of the motivations and organisation of protest groups
using primary qualitative research; and c) semi-structured interviews with key policymakers,
activists and informed scholars, designed to reconstruct the policy thinking of the time.
The results of the research failed to validate the proposition that riots engendered
accountability for hunger: we found no strong evidence that any of the protests, even the
most visceral and important, the garments workers’ protests, had directly influenced the
policy response. But this was not because popular protest had no power in this context.
Instead, it reflected the fact that protest was, in the main, unnecessary
. The garments
workers’ protests highlighted the plight of low-paid urban workers during the food crisis,
v
but the official machinery was already working to address the situation in its usual mode.
If anything, the research findings suggest the causality went in the opposite direction: that
the existence (over a longer time period) of relatively effective policies and an institutional
architecture for response, and an associated expectation of public action during subsistence
crises meant it made sense for garments workers (and a small number of other groups) to
protest at this time: their basic survival was threatened, they were able to organise, and they
had reasonable expectations that their actions would elicit a response.
Looked at closely, both the ‘food riots’ and the policy response turned out to be more
ambiguous and contingent than their headlines suggest. What the long lenses of the global
media framed as ‘food riots’ looked different up close and through the filter of domestic
politics – arguably these were not food riots in any common sense of the term. As for the
policy response, while over the medium term this was sound enough, for those facing
hunger it was too late and perhaps also too little. That the government of the moment was
an unelected military-backed caretaker regime lent the perception that the lagged response
reflected the absence of powerful electoral pressures for action.
Tellingly, the popular
assessment of the situation was that a democratically elected (‘political government’
in the
local term) would have responded faster and better. (It is not clear that this is in fact the case,
as the supra-national nature of the crisis was a complexity and a constraint.)
The garments workers’ protests may not have been the cause of the policies that tackled the
food price spike, but our analysis suggests that these events were correlated, both rooted
in the moral and political economy of subsistence crises in Bangladesh. Our analysis of the
2007–12 period is a mere snapshot of a more dynamic historical cycle of interaction between
popular mobilisation and policy responses. During this period, ‘food riots’
did not trigger the
policy response but over the longer term, the causality seems to run in the other direction:
garments workers protested because they were excluded from the protections enjoyed by
other Bangladeshis, and because they had good reason to believe that responsive and
effective policies could also be established for them. Their struggle – framed as wages and
workers’ rights, not food rights – is ongoing.
We conclude that ‘food riots’ or indeed subsistence protests, did not occur on any significant
scale in Bangladesh because they were generally unnecessary: there is a functioning ‘politics
of provisions’ here that ensures that ruling elites cannot ignore mass subsistence crises like
2008 without incurring a disempowering loss of legitimacy. For politico-historical, electoral
and possibly ecological reasons, the compact between the Bangladeshi masses and their
ruling elites centres on the protection of subsistence during shocks. The 1974 famine casts a
particularly long shadow over food policy in Bangladesh, serving as a reminder of the fragility
both of subsistence and of political legitimacy in this context.
The ‘politics of provisions’ in
Bangladesh work to keep basic food (not nutrition) security at the top of the political and
policy agenda. Few Bangladeshis need to risk actual food riots because most of those
exposed to such shocks receive the protection they need, more or less when they need it.
By the time a riot occurs, it is already too late: the threat of the loss of legitimacy is powerful
enough to drive a reasonable policy and political response.

The impact of resources on social unrest is of increasing interest to political leaders, business and civil society. Recent events have highlighted that (lack of) access to critical resources, including food, energy and water, can, in certain circumstances, lead to violent demonstrations. In this paper, we assess a number of political fragility indices to see whether they are good indicators of propensity to food riots. We found that the most accurate is the Political Instability and Absence of Violence Indicator of the Worldwide Governance Indicators by the World Bank. We compute a likelihood of experiencing a food riot for each quartile of this index. We found that the self-sufficiency of food does not seem to affect the likelihood of the occurrence of food riots, but that the level of political stability of a country does have a role. In addition, we identify a monthly and annual threshold for the Food and Agriculture Organisation Food Price Index, above which food riots in fragile states are more likely to occur.