Food Riots, Food Rights and the Politics of Provisions

Thousands of people in dozens of countries took to the streets when world food prices spiked in 2008 and 2011. What does the persistence of popular mobilization around food tell us about the politics of subsistence in an era of integrated food markets and universal human rights? This book interrogat [...]
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Thousands of people in dozens of countries took to the streets when world food prices spiked in 2008 and 2011. What does the persistence of popular mobilization around food tell us about the politics of subsistence in an era of integrated food markets and universal human rights? This book interrogates this period of historical rupture in the global system of subsistence, getting behind the headlines and inside the politics of global food crisis. The half decade of 2007-12 was a period of intensely volatile food prices as well as unusual levels of popular mobilization, including protests and riots. Detailed case studies are included from Bangladesh, Cameroon, India, Kenya and Mozambique. The case studies illustrate that political cultures and ways of organizing around food share much across geography and history, indicating common characteristics of the popular politics of subsistence under capitalism. However, all politics are ultimately local, and it is demonstrated how the political responses and policy fallout of a subsistence crisis depends ultimately on how the key actors and institutions articulate, negotiate, and reassert their specific claims. A key conclusion of the book is that the politics of provisions remain essential to the right to food and that they involve unruliness: in other words, food riots work, and this book explains how and why they continue to do so in the globalized food systems on the 21st century. Food riots signal as state unable to meet a principal condition of its social contract, and create powerful pressure on a state to address that most fundamental of failings.