Food riots and the politics of provisions from early modern Europe and China to the food crisis of 2008

Abstract

The food riots of 2007–2008 jolted authoritarian regimes and international agencies into action. The riots also began to crack neoliberal hegemony over the global food system. Food riots have often driven a politics of provisions, sometimes winning relief, sometimes merely bloody repression, depending on a particular country’s political economy. Such bargaining in the politics of provisions is made possible by existing networks – of solidarity among the common people and reciprocity between them and their rulers – that extend elements of ‘normal’ politics into crises. This paper explores how riotous extensions of such sociopolitical networks shaped food politics in early modern England and China, Famine Ireland, the ‘IMF (International Monetary Fund) austerity riots’ of the 1980s and 1990s, and the food riots of 2007–2008.

Keywords:

• food riots
• politics of provisions
• moral economy
• neoliberal
• England
• China
• 2008 food crisis

Acknowledgements

For constructive criticism of this manuscript: Kathleen E. Bohstedt, Lauren Q. Sneyd, Jonathan Shefner, Deborah Valenze, Cynthia A. Bouton, Naomi Hossain and her colleagues in the Food Riots and Food Rights project at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, UK.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCiD

John Bohstedt http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9919-4949

Notes

¹This epigraph is the colloquial and familiar rendering of the original words in the second finale of The Threepenny Opera (Brecht 1931; 2005 ed.).

²The six non-riotous countries with ‘extremely alarming’ Global Hunger Index ratings were Burundi, Congo, Ethiopia, Liberia, Niger and Sierra Leone (Von Grebmer et al. 2008). The poorest people and regions were often both rural and non-riotous (Barrett 2013; Bouton 1993).

³I have borrowed these useful rubrics from van Stekelenburg, Roggeband, and Klandermans (2013).

⁴Appadurai (1984, 481) defines such enfranchisement as ‘the degree to which an individual or group can legitimately participate in the decisions of a given society about entitlement’.

⁵As e.g. Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651, 157). Libertarian legal scholar Richard A. Epstein writes: ‘[In] the common law in England and the United States, and the earlier Roman law … the basic rules of property will normally be suspended in the face of necessity … . This necessity exception is narrowly defined to cover only those cases where there is imminent peril to life or to property’ (Epstein 1995, 113).

⁶This study shares perspectives on the political economy of the global food regime with Patel and McMichael (2009), but their essay emphasizes its structure, while I focus more on political networks and dynamics at national levels.

⁷‘ … social capital, which refers to the trust, norms and networks that are generated by participation in informal or formal groupings and associations that facilitate interaction and cooperation among people’ (Brinkman and Hendrix 2011, 17, citing Collier 2000, 99).

⁸For analyses of ‘political opportunity’ see McAdam, Tarrow, & Tilly 2001, and Goodwin & Jasper 2012.

⁹The English Poor Law (1601) mandated local welfare payments to the destitute (‘paupers’), funded by local taxes, and managed by inquisitive local officials.

¹⁰The Provision of Meals Act of 1906 enabled poor children to be given free meals at school-board schools. In 1914, the national Board of Education’s chief medical officer said, ‘Experience shows that food riots are inspired largely by the hunger of children, and if that problem can be met, a large operating factor in the causation of riots is removed’ (quoted in Ross 1990, 186).

¹¹For the monstrous famines brought on by Stalin’s and Mao’s agricultural policies, good entry points are Middell and Wemheuer (2012) and Wemheuer (2014).

¹²For instance, from 1999–2001 to 2008–2009, total world cereal production increased by 20.2 percent while total population increased by 11 percent (calculated from the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) Statistical Yearbook 2010, Tables A1 and B1). Jason W. Moore has raised the question whether current food crises reflect a systemic (possibly terminal) breakdown of the global capitalist ecology that depends, for instance, on the ‘plunder’ of accumulated natural resources like water and soil fertility (Moore 2010). I owe this reference to an anonymous critic of The Journal of Peasant Studies.

¹³My discussion of Egypt’s labour movement and food riots relies both on the research of Joel Beinin and Harrigan and El-Said (2009) and Bassiouny and Said (2008), and on contemporary accounts from the Al-Jazeera, Reuters, Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN, an agency of the United Nations until 2015), Agence Française-Presse, Al Masry Al-Youm et al., blogs of Hossam El-Hamalawy, and especially Jones (2008a, 2008b), Charbel (2008) and Rizk (2010, 2011).

¹⁴Besides Egypt, popular outrage at governments’ ‘austerity’ measures spawned two dozen ‘major outbreaks of social unrest’ in another eight countries in the Middle East and North Africa between 1977 and 1992 (Walton and Seddon 1994, 171; cf. Gutner 2002; Harrigan and El-Said 2009; Metz 1990; Sadiki 2000).

¹⁵Joel Beinin (2012, 104) expresses doubts as to how many Cairenes stayed home on strike day. But he was in Mahalla that day, while Mossallem was an eyewitness in Cairo, where press agencies reported the streets to be nearly deserted (cf. Bayat 2013).

¹⁶I am very grateful to Professor Harrigan for allowing me to consult her lecture.

¹⁷UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon had said on 2 April 2008 that Haiti’s economy was better than it had been in the past decade (cited in Schuller 2008).

¹⁸Five weeks before the food riots began, between 5000 and 10,000 Lavalas supporters demonstrated in Port au Prince to mark the fourth anniversary of Aristide’s ouster. In February 2007, tens of thousands of Lavalas supporters held demonstrations in the capital and six other cities (HaitiAction 2007, 2008a).

¹⁹Of 32 ‘fragile states’ identified by the World Bank, only six had riots (Brinkman and Hendrix 2011).

²⁰De Brito et al. say that the Mozambiquan government developed a sort of ‘authoritarian responsiveness’ (De Brito et al. 2014, 36).

²¹Berazneva and Lee (2013) list Ethiopia among riotous countries, but I have been unable to confirm that from other sources.

²²Lentz et al. (2013), Introduction to a Special Section of World Development on food aid and food assistance, provides a fine and succinct overview. Comprehensive studies are Clapp (2012) and Barrett, Binder, and Steets (2012). See also Ansell (2014). The food crisis and riots of 2008 speeded up important evolutions of food aid already begun (Clapp 2012). The results are debated. Barrett, Binder, and Steets (2012, 1) speak of ‘the radically different nature of food assistance today as compared with a generation ago’. But Jennifer Clapp warns that within donor countries, business interests, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and government bureaucracies have ‘great influence’ over food aid/assistance policies, so that changes have been superficial (Clapp 2012, 162; cf. Clapp 2014; Clapp and Murphy 2013). Perhaps changes in the kinds of food assistance are dwarfed by persistence in quantities – of tied aid, for instance.

²³The figures include both United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) (‘farm bill’) and United States Agency for International Development spending for LRP in 2010.

²⁴In addition to works cited in note 22 above, my chief sources for the impact of 2008 on food policies are: Clapp (2009), Mousseau (2010), McKeon (2011), Wise and Murphy (2013) and Margulis (2013, 2014a, 2014b).

²⁵Attributed to the ‘Green Revolution’, though its sustainability has been debated.

²⁶In August 2008, lesser riots broke out over scarce food supplies in Eastern Bihar after devastating floods.

²⁷But see Lola Nayar’s succinct critique of the recent politics of the public distribution system (2015).

²⁸It seems likely that as these women moved from subordinate roles in the private economy of a patriarchal family to the role of wage earner and even breadwinner in the ‘public economy’ of factory work and markets, it liberated and empowered them as agents in the political economy of riot and provision politics (cf. Hossain and Jahan 2014; and Daines and Seddon 1994). Working women in eighteenth-century English food riots had been thus empowered (Bohstedt 1988).

²⁹Biofuels consumed between 24 and 30 percent of the US corn crop in 2008 (USDA 2015, Table 5: Corn supply, disappearance and share of total corn used for ethanol).

³⁰UN OHCHR (2011). On the WTO I have used Margulis (2014a, 2014b), McKeon (2011), Clapp (2014), De Schutter and Cordes (2011), Hawkes and Plahe (2013) and Hopewell (2015).

³¹‘For all the free-trade talk, the [WTO’s] Agreement on Agriculture shows that global markets in agriculture are intensely distorted to meet the interests of those with power’ (Hawkes and Plahe 2013, 34).

³²De Brito et al. report a very significant kind of ‘authoritarian responsiveness’ developed by the Mozambiquan state during the series of protest episodes from 2008 to 2012 (De Brito et al. 2014, 1, 38).

³³Theda Skocpol explains the combination of forces needed for social revolution (Skocpol 1976, 1979).

Additional information

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John Bohstedt

John Bohstedt is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His research has focused mainly on riots as a form of politics, and particularly the local and larger political relationships and cultures, plus the political economies, that shape food riots. His research has also been shaped by his own activism in community politics. His recent book is The politics of provisions: food riots, moral economy, and market transition in England, c. 1550–1850 (Ashgate, 2010).