Food Riots, Food Rights and the Politics of Provisions

2Aworldinprotest Sara Burke Introduction During the time period covered by the Food Riots and Food Rights project, 2007-2012, the world registered a dramatic eruption of protests on many issues, includingfood. The protests were largely non-violent, but during these years episodes reported as "riots" and "violent protests" also occurred. These spiked to historic levels in 2008, 2011 and 2012 in response to price hikes for basic commodities necessary to life: fuel, water and especially food. Protests for subsistence have not been well understood, as they were not well covered in international news due to systematic biases in professional media organizations, which tend to ignore nonviolentprotests — or the nonviolent parts of protests — and also fail to distinguish between acts that harm lives and those that harm property, as well as labeling "violent" both riots and protests violently repressed by the state. This chapter aims to show how the historical eruption of protests throughoutthe period can be understood as a response to the stormy political economy 1 of the time. To many critics of the dominant economic paradigm, that time is best understood as the forseeable outcome of neoliberalism, what classical politicaleconomists Gérard Dúmenil and Dominique Lévy's 2011 book The Crisis of Neoliberalism characterizes as a globalized system of "free-market economics, free trade, and the free mobility of capital", literally a "new liberalism" and correspondingsocial order in which fmancialization propels a managerial apparatus that disciplines labor with greater and greater intensity (Dúmenil and Lévy 2011: 35). "Neoliberalism" as a term of art, is typically counterposed to "globalization". Proponents of inclusive, managed globalization have approached the period with a critique of its policy paradigm, the so-called "Washington Consensus", which Keynesian Joseph Stiglitz characterized in his 2002 book Globalization and its Discontentsas the point at which growth, privatization and liberalization became ends in themselves, rather than means toward a more equitable distribution that benefits even the poor ( Stiglitz 2002 ). Neoclassical economist John Williamson, originator of the term "Washington Consensus", frequently complained that the set of ten policies he felt were widely held in Washington based institutions like the IMF, World Bank and U.S. Treasury in 1989-1990 (e.g. fiscal discipline, reorientation of public expenditures, tax reform, financial liberalization, unified Sara Burke and competitive exchange rates, trade liberalization, openness to direct foreign investment, privatization, deregulation and secure property rights) were good policies for Latin America at that time, but had been subsequently expanded by both proponents and critics into a generalized policy prescription he had not originally intended, although he didn't necessarily disagree with it ( Williamson 2004 : 1,22). 2 Whether classical, neoclassical or Keynesian in theoretical orientation and regardless of their differing perspectives, these economists agree on the significanceof the period's economic growth and the corresponding role of liberalization,financialization and deregulation in shaping the political economy of the time. Two economic events of great magnitude in the commodities and financial markets took place that were driven by these very forces. Like storms rolling in from opposite horizons in 2007-2008, historically high commodity prices hit the global economy just as mortgage-based finance began its historic collapse. Flaunted profits and conspicuous consumption, which accompanied both the commodities boom and the financial crisis, enraged populations, which believed a tacit contract between citizens and state had been broken when basic economic needs were priced out of reach ( Hossain et al. 2014 ). This crisis of the "moral economy" affected not only food and fuel protests in 2007-2008 and 2011-2012, but also helps us understand why one of the key demands coming out of the so-called Arab Spring, the Movement of the Squares in Europe and the Occupy movement that began on Wall Street and spread to many cities was the demand for "real democracy" in the face of unaccountablegovernments. To better examine these crises in the political and moral economy, we will draw from a data set on protests and political participation in the period 2006-2013 2013 that was created by the author and a multilingual research team between 2013 and the present, outlining the main findings from this global study of 3 protests. This data set, which coincidentally overlaps 2007-2012 by one year at the beginning and end of the period, is also the basis of an analysis of 843 4 protest events appearing in more than 500 news sources available on the internet, and in 84 countries representing more than 90 per cent of the world population ( Ortiz et al. 2013 ). It takes note of main grievances and demands, who and how many were protesting and where, what methods/repertoires they used, who their opponents or targets were and what resulted from the episode of protests - not only in terms of meeting the goals of a campaign, but also in terms of negative or positive unintended consequences such as repression on the one hand, or the creation of new movements, groups or political parties on the other. The main phases in the political economy of the time break down into three parts of roughly two-year duration each - boom and bust (2007-2008), stimulus (2009-2010) and contraction (2011-2012). After first outlining main and relevant findings from the protests study, we will analyze the emergence of protest episodes during the three phases to better understand the politics of subsistence protests and their relationship to other protests at the time. Figure 2.1 Grievances and demands Source: Global Platform on Participation and Protest data, 2014 World protests (2006–2013) What becomes clear when we look at trends between 2006-2013 is that protests and protest movements were increasing in every geographic region and in every country income group (Ortiz ex al. 2013: 12-13; Carothers and Youngs 2015 : 22-23). The leading cause of all protests was a cluster of grievances against austeritypolicies and for economic justice that included demands to reform public services and pensions, create good jobs and better labour conditions, make tax collection and fiscal spending progressive, reduce or eliminate inequality, alleviatelow-living standards, enact land reform and ensure affordable food, energy and housing ( Figure 2.1 ). The key demand in a second cluster of grievances relating to failure of political representation and political systems was for "real democracy". It was also the single demand found most in world protests of the period and was counterposed to the actually-existing, corrupt and dysfunctional representative democracies that were increasingly faulted during this period for serving elites and private interests and for failing to stop growing economic inequality. Along with protests against corporate influence on government, deregulation, privatizationand corruption, the demand for real democracy was coming from every kind of political system, not only authoritarian administrations but also representative democracies, old and new. A third cluster, of globally organized — or globally aspirational - protests, was less coherent than the other clusters, but encompassed rising environmentaland climate movements, some aspects of Occupy and the Movement of the Squares, some indigenous movements and the ongoing alter-globalization movementagainst free trade and multinational agribusiness, as well as the burgeoningopen internet/internet commons movement of whistleblowers, leakers and anarchist-hackers. Whistleblowers, leakers and anarchist-hackers This movement includes actors as diverse as Samuel Provance, who exposed U.S. military torture in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2006, as well as whistleblowers/leakers Mark Klein, Thomas Drake and Edward Snowden, who each revealed aspects of U.S National Security Administrationdomestic spying ( Warren and Dirksen 2014 : 72-74) and military intelligenceanalyst U.S. Army Cpl. Bradley Manning, 5 who leaked 750,000 classified and sensitive military and diplomatic documents in early 2010 to raise awareness of the human costs of war. These leaks, which came to be known as the "Iraq War Logs" ( Wikileaks 2010a ) and "Afghan War Diary" ( Wikileaks 2010b ), were published on the website Wikileaks by self-proclaimed "cypherpunk" Julian Assange ( Assange et al. 2012 ). While each of these agents acted independently, the hacktivism movement coalescedaround the group Anonymous, which — among a variety of vigilante actions in different countries — protested the authorities' mishandling of A world in protest a rape and sexting case in Nova Scotia, Canada, resulting in the subsequentsuicide of victim Rehtaeh Parsons. Anonymous hackers determined the identies of the perpetrators and threatened to expose them if relevant government and law enforcement authorities did not hold them accountableto the rule of law ( CTV News Atlantic 2013 ; Slifer 2013 ; Kotz 2013 ; Griner 2014 ). The activities of the movement contributed to an upsurge of interest in acts of solidarity such as mutual aid and building a global information commons, but in the case of the Wikileaks and the revelations of Edward Snowden, also inadvertently acted as catalysts to world events that became violent or were met with violence, beginning with Wikileaks' impact on the Arab Spring. In Tunisia,

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