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Africa: 'Let Them Eat Subsidies?'
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UN Integrated Regional Information Networks
ANALYSIS
7 April 2008
Posted to the web 7 April 2008
Johannesburg
Food prices have the potential to change regimes and the course of history. When Marie Antoinette allegedly said, "Let them eat cake" in 1789, she was wondering why higher bread prices were causing so much trouble in Paris.
Food security analysts, NGOs, think-tanks and the World Bank all say pushing the urban poor beyond their purchasing limits can and will cause unrest, and net food-importing countries are most at risk. Leaders may not be facing the guillotine in 2008, but some are already feeling the sharp edge of popular uprising. The most obvious tools to cushion the impact of the price rises - tax cuts and subsidies - not only go against free-market dictums but are frequently unaffordable for governments, analysts say.
"Governments don't generally worry overmuch for the fate of poor people most affected by dearth - until the protests mount," said John Walton, who teaches sociology at the University of California, and is co-author of Free Trade and Food Riots. "Regrettably, these pains are often justified in neo-liberal economic ideology as necessary reforms, despite a lack of evidence for their effectiveness."
The recent spate of food riots and demonstrations in West Africa may signal a new phase in the protest cycle, he said. Many analysts agree.
At least two dozen deaths have been reported in riots sparked by a sharp increase in food and fuel prices around the world, most recently in Egypt, Senegal, Cameroon and Cote d'Ivoire.
IMF riots
Governments don't generally worry overmuch for the fate of poor people most affected by dearth - until the protests mount
The last protest wave arose in the late 1970s in response to food and fuel price hikes after the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and lender countries forced poor countries to implement budget cuts. The impact was felt worldwide, beginning in Latin America and extending to Africa and Asia, to include perhaps 200 instances in over 40 countries, according to Walton.
The protests, known as the "IMF riots", were marked by strikes, demonstrations, rioting and looting and prompted by the contention that "the poor were being made to suffer" because of the "profligate lending by governments and banks", he said. "These protests had varied effects, destabilising governments in some places, winning reforms in others, and inviting repression in many.
"Sudan in 1982 was a case where the government fell largely as the result of austerity protests," he explained. "In lots of other places [Peru] regime-changing elections have been moved along by unrest."
While the current protests have been sparked by the hike in petrol prices and the related impact on food costs, noted Walton, "the instances of popular demonstration and riots in Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea, and Burkina Faso replicate in many ways the protest repertoire and sense of injustice that characterised the IMF riots and earlier historical protest cycles. Time will tell how large the current protest wave will become."
"Agflation" is the new buzzword to describe the food price hikes, on account of an increase in demand for cereals such as maize and soybean for human consumption and biofuels. The price of non-fuel-related grains such as rice and wheat has also rocketed.
The World Bank announced last week that at least 33 countries, which depend largely on imported food, could face potential social unrest. Kanayo Nwanze, vice-president of the UN International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), warned: "The escalation of social unrest we have seen in Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Mauritania and Senegal may become commonplace in other African countries."
Protests have also been reported in many Asian countries, especially the Philippines, where rice prices are reported to have gone by 70 percent within a year. According to the Wall Street Journal, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is considering a moratorium on using agricultural land for housing developments or golf courses. Her government is urging fast-food restaurants to offer half-portions of rice to cut the country's rice bill.
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"Resource scarcity is a long-term problem, and is likely to get worse with climate change - which will see reduced productivity, especially in countries where resources such as land, food, income, are 'captured' by an elite, and/or where inequalities are particularly bad," according to social historian Diana Cammack, with the UK Overseas Development Institute.
The riots are about access to food, she points out, "where the poor have a reduced chance [compared to the rich] of getting to the food that is in the country ... famines are often linked not simply to scarcity but to the cost of food and thus access to it".
Urban poor
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