Raj Patel: What Food Riots Really Are

posted by brooklynfoodconference, on May 22, 2009

FOOD REBELLIONS WORKSHOP

Raj Patel is the author of Stuffed and Starved, The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, an exposé of the global food system and how activists are gaining ground against its corporate control. He is a researcher at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for African Studies, a researcher with the Land Research Action Network, and a Fellow with Food First, a leading food think tank. He has written for the Los Angeles Times and The Guardian, and though he has worked for the World Bank, WTO, and the UN, he’s also been tear-gassed on four continents protesting them. He recently completed a book on the financial crisis that will be coming out soon.

The journalists always arrive too late, so all they see is a burning tire in the middle of the road. The journalists wax rhapsodic about “The poor people running through the streets, trying to smash windows wherever they could,” the idea being that in a food riot the poor people of the world are reduced to two organs—growling stomachs and clenched fists. That’s all they are—they’re these animal passions that run through the streets seeking food.

What happens in a food riot is way more political. Whenever you hear of spontaneous riots, you should always be very suspicious. As community organizers, we all know food riots are never spontaneous. It takes forever to organize a spontaneous riot. When you hear of these spontaneous hungry people, you know there’s something else going on.

What I want to do is run through a number of reasons why we had the food price spike last year and then link back to why there were protests.

Behind Last Year’s Food Price Spike
Last year, then-President-no-longer-President George Bush (we can have a little cheer there, if you like), reluctantly answered a question about why food prices were going up. Prices went up many, many fold last year. The price of rice went up by 30% in a single day. What he said was, “You know, those Indians, the middle class, when those 150 million people start getting rich, they start demanding things.” [After Rice, Bush Blames India]

Then one of his aides stepped in to fill in the gaps. “What the president was arguing was because people in the developing world, particularly in India, now have more money they were demanding more food and that was driving the price up. You can blame India for the increase in food prices.” In particular, George Bush was arguing that people in India were demanding more meat. The food crisis last year, according to the President, was really about meat, about millions of Indians suddenly deciding that what they wanted a hamburger.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with India, but we’re a Hindu lot. There wasn’t a sort of “Big Mac! Big Mac!” Nope, never happen.

But this is a good place to start investigating why the price of food went up, because certainly the meat industry does have a lot to do with driving up the price of grain. It takes seven pounds of grain to produce a pound of beef, so of course the price of grain will have an effect on driving up the price of meat. But the country that consumes the most meat is not India. It’s here. You need seven planets to provide enough grain to sustain the meat production that the average American eats.

But Bush’s answer was a certain kind of misdirection. There were other reasons the price of food went up last year. One of them was biofuels. I mentioned this earlier on, the idea that you grow food to set it on fire—that’s what biofuels are. In every way, biofuels are a mad policy. They are not environmentally sustainable. They require more energy to make than you get by releasing them.

The Real Story behind Food Protests
But last year was an election year, and in an election year it’s better to burn American corn than it is to burn Saudi oil. So biofuels drove the price of grain up, because when you grow biofuels you grow corn. The Federal government said, “We’re going to buy all the corn that anyone can shake a stick at!”

The farmers quite reasonably said, “Right. Well, we’re going to switch to corn.”

So what does that do? First, that takes land that was being used to grow wheat out of production, so the price of wheat goes up. Then because there’s less corn to eat, the price of corn goes up. Then, as a result of the price of corn going up, the price of substitutes goes up. In the US, yellow corn was being used to make ethanol, but there’s a substitute, and that’s white corn. In Mexico, the price of white corn was more or less controlled by one company, Archer Daniels Midland. They speculated on the price of corn. They drove the price of white corn way up. That’s how US biofuels policy resulted in tortilla riots that we saw in Mexico City in 2007. What that was about was not people saying, “Arghhhh! The price of…!” The tortilla riots were not about people going crazy. Instead they were a specific critique of government.

Whenever you see a food rebellion, it’s about not only a demand for food but also about a sudden gap between what you believe is your right and what you’re able to buy with your food dollars. We see hunger throughout the world, but we see the riots, we see the protests when there’s a sudden increase in the gap between what people believe is their right and what they’re able to afford. This expectations gap is an integral part of the idea of a food riot. I want to use that idea to get to a couple of food riots that I think were tremendously important.

One, of course, is the Haitian riot where all we saw was the smoldering tires, but in fact what Haitians were in the street demanding was the return of Jean-Bertrand Aristede , the president who was thrown out of that country by George Bush. [Man in audience yells out, "Kidnapped!"] Kidnapped and then thrown out. This isn’t something that appeared on our radar screens. It was never reported that actually there were politically articulated demands behind the food protests. Instead what we had was “Haitians, they’re going crazy again. They’re mad.”

I think the way to understand that is to understand a US food riot that happened in this city in 1917 at the end of the First World War. There was a spike in the price of food across America. The people whose job it was to put food on the table couldn’t. Those people were invariably women. But, in 1917, women didn’t have the right to vote. There was no way women could write to their elected representative and complain about the price of food, because they had no elected representatives. In 1917, there were already great forces of political organizing in this city—socialized women’s groups who were organizing women not only for the vote, for the franchise, but also for control over the economy. That’s why in 1917 women took to the streets in what were called food riots but were in fact a series of very carefully calibrated and articulated demands not only for food that was affordable to everyone but also for the right to engage in politics, for the right to a politics.

That’s what food rebellions are. That’s what we lose when we call them “food riots.” Food rebellions are a demand for a right to politics. That’s the key idea here. In all the movements around the world that are fighting for food, they’re fighting for a right to politics. What the World Bank does is come in and depoliticize. What the USDA does is come in and “render technocratic”—it makes a technical-expert decision about whether we’re going to have our food or not. And what food rebellions are is a symptom of is people taking that back, taking back as right to politics.

And it works. The dark secret about food rebellions is that they do work. Because of what happened in 1917 as a result of the food protests here and in Philadelphia and in Boston and Chicago, the nineteenth amendment was passed. Women were allowed to vote in this country because of food rebellions. That story is where I want to end because it shows the great promise that there is in community organizing—the great promise that food rebellions offer but only if we understand that they’re not mad riots of the senseless but carefully organized cries of people demanding their politics back.

Food Rebellions Workshop: Over the last year there have been over 30 food rebellions or “riots,” primarily in third world nations. This workshop examines the causes of steeply rising food prices and shortages in poor nations, the history of food riots in the US, and how farmers and consumers are struggling to push back.

Other Speakers: Jennifer Steverson (Weeksville Heritage Center), Bazelais Jean-Baptiste (Bassin Zim Education & Development Fund). Moderator: Ashley Dawson (CUNY Graduate Center)

A Few Related Writings by Raj Patel

• Morning Forum: Raj Patel’s Speech
  Our mouths are the most dangerous part of our body. more
• The WTO and Other Trade Tales
  By Raj Patel. December , 2008. more
• Tortilla riots, mud cakes and why your food is so expensive
  by Raj Patel. August 10, 2008. more
• How to Think about Food Riots
  from Raj Patel’s blog. April 10, 2009. more
• 30 Years Ago Haiti Grew All the Rice It Needed. What Happened?
  from Raj Patel’s blog. April 6, 2009. more
• Raj’s Blog

—Paige Churchman

Other BFC Speeches:  Patel (keynote)| Redmond | Prof. Louie |  Lappé |  D. Jackson