Introduction

Sowing the Seeds of Revolution

On the morning of December 17, 2010, Mohammed Bouazizi—a self-employed, unlicensed fruit vendor from the impoverished suburbs of Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia—approached the headquarters of his city’s provincial governor, doused himself with paint thinner, and set himself on fire. The sole breadwinner for a family of six, Bouazizi’s numerous efforts to sidestep the city’s prohibitively expensive vendor licensing fees had, over the years, provoked a handful of fines and the relentless harassment of inspection officials. On this particular morning, however, these boiling tensions came to an explosive head. After being approached, once again, by local officials regarding his “illegal” fruit cart, he tried in vain to pay a 10 dinar fine on the spot, or “the equivalent of a good day’s earnings.”¹ Refusing his overtures, fed-up inspectors seized Bouazizi’s wheelbarrow and an estimated $225 worth of produce and equipment, comprising “the entire capital of his business.”² As Bouazizi struggled to “yank back his apples,”³ a policewoman reportedly “slapped the scrawny young man, spat in his face and insulted his dead father.”⁴ Humiliated and dejected, Bouazizi began frantically seeking assistance, as well as the immediate return of his property, from municipal officials. Having been repeatedly snubbed, however, Bouazizi—overwhelmed and inconsolable—set himself in flames and, in so doing, ignited a revolution.

Figure 1: A Man Points a Baguette at Security Forces during the Tunisian Revolution

Source: FRANCE24, 2011.

As subsequent events revealed, Bouazizi’s indignation was shared by many of his compatriots. Indeed, during the days that followed Bouazizi’s fiery demonstration, Tunisians began pouring into the streets and squares of their respective villages, towns, and cities, demanding deep political reforms and immediate government-sponsored relief from the interminable specter of chronic hunger. Brandishing freshly-baked baguettes (Figure 1) and carrying signs bearing the popular slogan “Bread and Water without Dictatorship,”⁵ the Tunisian demonstrators placed the issue of food (in)security squarely at the center of their demands for a more equitable government, economy, and society. In response to the growing unrest, Tunisia’s president of some twenty-three years, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, announced a range of sweeping reforms, including forthcoming elections, hundreds of thousands of new jobs,⁶ and, in an attempt to significantly lower the skyrocketing costs of living for the country’s poorest, most vulnerable citizens, heavy state subsidies for basic foodstuffs.

Such belated concessions, however, were not enough to quell the fury of Tunisia’s mobilized, hungry crowds. On January 4, 2011, Bouazizi sadly succumbed to his self-inflicted wounds in hospital. And during the days that immediately followed his widely-publicized funeral, the country’s anti-government demonstrations intensified considerably. As protesters clashed with security forces, Ben Ali began imposing curfews, closing schools and universities, and rounding up longtime political dissidents, including Hamma Hammami, the leader of the banned Tunisian Workers’ Communist Party.⁷ By mid-month, however, the revolutionary tides began to turn. With the country’s armed forces surrounding his flamboyant palace in Tunis, Ben Ali declared a “state of emergency,” resigned as Tunisia’s president, and, after transporting himself and his immediate family members to nearby Laouina Airport, fled the country.⁸

Figure 2: An Egyptian Man Protests against Hosni Mubarak’s Government with His Infamous “Bread Helmet” in Cairo’s Tahrir Square

Source: Khaled Abdullah, 2011.

Over the course of subsequent months, Bouazizi’s “spark” kindled a massive inferno of demonstrations, uprisings, and even full-scale revolutions across both North and Central Africa and parts of the Middle East (Figure 2).⁹ Much like the Tunisian, or “Jasmine,” Revolution, these popular mobilizations, which have come to be known colloquially as the “Arab Spring,” were fueled by what journalist Thanassis Cambanis has aptly referred to as the region’s “bread politics.” “The Arab world cannot feed itself,”  Cambanis writes, reflecting on the significant role played by widespread poverty and hunger within the Arab Spring uprisings, adding that: “Rulers obsessed with security have created a twisted web of importers and bakeries whose aim is not to feed the population efficiently or nutritiously but simply to maintain the regime and stave off that much feared revolution of the hungry.”¹⁰ In the spring of 2011, however, this “twisted web” completely unraveled, exposing the depth of the region’s alimentary, economic, and political vulnerabilities to what has become an increasingly integrated, and volatile, global economy and food system.

The numerous contributions made by chronic hunger to the Arab uprisings of 2011 serve as timely reminders of the long-standing linkages between food, power, and subaltern agency. Trapped between the seemingly irresistible pressures of the international marketplace, on the one hand, and the oppressive conditions of localized “authoritarian familial kleptocracies,”¹¹ on the other, impoverished consumers from every corner of the Arab World demanded not just democracy, equality, and opportunity but, equally as significant, “just prices” for staple foods by deploying the vocabulary and stratagems of what historian E.P. Thompson famously referred to as the “moral economy.”

This issue of Zapruder World explores the history of social and political conflicts through the lens of food (in)security. Spanning two millennia, and covering topics including subaltern food systems, food riots, and the relationship between food and collective memory, among others, the articles featured here illuminate the various ways in which food—in both its abundance and scarcity—has served as a catalyst for both small- and large-scale historical change in a variety of different temporal and sociological contexts. Much like the Arab revolutionaries of 2011, the individuals and organizations featured in this volume’s essays struggled, sometimes successfully, for a more equitable food system. And in so doing, they “made history.” From below.

 

Towards a Global “Bread Politics”

Today’s integrated global system of agricultural production, in fact, is a relatively recent development, beginning in earnest only a half century ago. As food policy analysts Eric Holt-Giménez and Annie Shattuck have pointed out, a wide range of “structural adjustments” to the global economy between the 1970s and 1990s “broke down tariffs, dismantled national marketing boards, eliminated price guarantees and destroyed national agricultural research and extension systems in the Global South,” and, generally, fostered a “neo-liberal capitalist expansion” of institutions for producing and distributing basic foodstuffs, most importantly the World Trade Organization, which was established in 1995.¹² Such unprecedented global “adjustments,” however, were components of a much broader, and longer, process known as the “Green Revolution.” Billed by its most zealous proponents as a modern, “scientific” solution to the longstanding problem of world hunger, the Green Revolution has, indeed, “intensified labor productivity, increased overall food production and undoubtedly contributed to the global increase in population” while simultaneously increasing the dependence of farmers and their local communities upon the impersonal, and unforgiving, ebbs and flows of the international marketplace.¹³

The Green Revolution’s agro-industrial underpinnings began in the nineteenth-century, when farmers in Europe and North America began relying upon chemical- and nitrogen-added fertilizers, along with a wide range of fossil-fueled agricultural machinery, in order to boost their annual crop yields.¹⁴ The resulting increases in production sustained massive population growths, as well as propelled European settler colonialism around the world. In 1896, Wilbur Atwater discovered the calorie, rendering all global sources of nutrition interchangeable, and by about 1949 Norman Borlaug, in partnership with Mexican agronomists, had strong-(f)armed genetically modified wheat into astronomical yields in Mexico (a maize society).¹⁵ The “fruits” of American science, distributed through international capitalist markets, could help “feed the world,” many Green revolutionaries confidently exclaimed, albeit while simultaneously undermining local and regional alimentary autonomy and obliterating popular foodways. In the 1960s, this model became the United States’ response to communism’s inroads among starving peasants in China, the Philippines, India, Afghanistan, Tunisia, and elsewhere. Local elites, also struggling against communism in their respective countries, welcomed the United States’ assistance and jumped at the opportunity to serve as the major buyers and sellers of new hybrid seeds and agricultural chemicals. For example, Ferdinand Marcos’ government in the Philippines—and not American developers—was the first to call new Genetically Modified Organism (or GMO) strains “Miracle Rice.”¹⁶ In India, Indira Gandhi’s support for the Green Revolution proved prescient when unprecedented crop yields stopped a disastrous famine in 1967 (which was probably caused by the very same forces).¹⁷

Critics of the Green Revolution, however, have pointed to its mis-concentration of agricultural production in specific parts of the world, its tendency towards mono-culture and cash-crops (or a marketable commodity-based agriculture), which has contributed significantly to overtaxed soils, and, finally, its impacts upon local communities, including farmers’ increased dependency upon international financial institutions, imported machinery, and petro-chemical fertilizers.¹⁸ Around the world, fertile regions which had previously sustained large populations have been completely transformed by the intensive production of single commodities, which may or may not be literally edible, and which farmers are supposed to exchange for currency in order to purchase (largely Westernized) foodstuffs via the international marketplace.

Aside from deteriorating ecosystems and public health, the Green Revolution has placed numerous developing countries, including many of those in the Arab World, in a position of “startling dependence” upon the international marketplace for feeding their populations. In today’s global economy, for instance, well over eighty percent of the global grain trade is controlled by just three multinational corporations—Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland (or ADM), and Bunge¹⁹—whose objectives, priorities, and behaviors directly, and disproportionately, shape the landscape of food (in)security for, quite literally, billions of hungry consumers throughout the Third, or “developing,” World. Indeed, nearly half of the top twenty importers of grain supplies in 2010 alone were Middle Eastern countries, including Egypt (1), Yemen (13), and Tunisia (17).²⁰

As a December 2010 policy brief by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization explained, various “shocks in the international arena can now transpire and propagate to domestic markets much quicker than before,” which, among other undesirable outcomes, has very often been translated into “extreme price volatility” for essential foodstuffs in the world’s most import-dependent countries.²¹ In other words, arbitrary prices—as opposed to nutrition or foodways—are increasingly determining the relationship between people and food security.

Due to the “shocks” of a number of prolonged droughts in grain-producing countries, rising oil prices, the increasing adoption of biofuels in developing regions, and, of course, the partial collapse of the global economy, many countries throughout the Global South witnessed skyrocketing food prices between 2007 and 2008. According to a report by the World Bank, for instance, global food prices rose by an astonishing eighty-three percent between 2005 and 2008, which included a forty-five percent increase between the fall of 2007 and the spring of the following year alone.²² By the early spring, global food policy analysts Eric Holt-Giménez and Loren Peabody have pointed out, “average world wheat prices were 130% above their level a year earlier, soy prices were 87% higher, rice had climbed 74%, and maize was up 31%.”²³ Predictably, such increases incited outrage among the world’s most impoverished, hungry citizens, leading to some sixty food-related demonstrations, riots, and uprisings in 2008.²⁴ Ranging from tortilla and bread riots in Mexico and Egypt, respectively, to a full-scale anti-government uprising in Haiti²⁵—which led, much as it would in Tunisia three years later, to the resignation of the Caribbean country’s prime minister—the 2008 food riots were merely the first in what would prove to be a wave of popular uprisings in response to rising socio-economic precarity and, above all, food insecurity which, when taken together, exposed the contradictions and vulnerabilities at the heart of the global food system.²⁶

While global food prices largely returned to their pre-2008 levels during the subsequent twelve months, a series of additional shocks to the international marketplace between 2009 and 2010 paved the way for the recurrence of both price volatility and popular outrage. In August 2010, for instance, a failed wheat harvest in Russia followed by crop-destroying floods in the United States and Australia combined to put unsustainable pressures upon the global food system, leading to sudden spikes in retail prices.²⁷ By December, when Bouazizi set himself in flames, the global food price index had increased by an alarming thirty-two percent, pushing millions of already-food-insecure consumers into a position of chronic hunger and, of course, leading to the wave of uprisings which subsequently swept across North Africa and the Middle East.²⁸

“[O]nce you look behind the cold curtain of statistics, you realise that something is fundamentally wrong with our food system,” exclaimed the anonymous authors of GRAIN’s April 2008 policy report, “Making a Killing from Hunger,” continuing:

We have allowed food to be transformed from something that nourishes people and provides them with secure livelihoods into a commodity for speculation and bargaining. The perverse logic of this system has come to a head. Today it is staring us in the face that this system puts the profits of investors before the food needs of people.²⁹

We are in a “structural meltdown,” the report’s authors maintain, which they claim is “the result of three decades of neoliberal globalization.”³⁰

 

Writing a Global Food History, from Below

The themes of food justice and social conflict, many of this volume’s articles demonstrate, illuminate the inherently social qualities of the global marketplace. As the renown political economist, Karl Polanyi, shrewdly pointed out, laissez-faire capitalism has undermined traditional moral economies around the world by “dis-embedding” the marketplace from its broader social spheres and running society “as an adjunct to the market.”³¹ There are certain limits, however, to this insidious fiction. To Polanyi, demonstrations, uprisings, and revolutions serve as a “countermovement” by which the popular classes demand to be re-embedded within the economy via specific social protections, including, but by no means limited to, harsh tariffs on imports, pro-labor legislative reforms and, of course, heavy subsidies on staple foods.³²

The Arab Spring revolutionaries, as well as the various methods of popular resistance outlined by this volume’s contributors, not only opposed the injustices of dis-embedded markets, they demanded a more equitable, humane—in a word, social—food system. While food has frequently factored into the re-embedding dynamic, due largely to the State’s role in guaranteeing an affordable food supply by protecting farmers from income volatility and helping to stabilize property values,³³ laissez-faire proponents have sought to undermine food’s social qualities, with alarming success, by frequently claiming that hunger was, and continues to be, a necessary consequence of poverty.³⁴ Such views were not isolated positions, but rather ideological components of a growing mentalité which claims that capitalism operates according to “natural” laws which, therefore, justify the marketplace’s perennial dominance of the lives, and dietary regimes, of the impoverished, hungry masses. While an emerging body of scholarship has begun to showcase the failures of Western agricultural development within the context of the Green Revolution, our understanding of the relationships between the food, inequality, and conflict, on a global level, is still relatively underdeveloped.³⁵ Only by examining these complex socio-economic dynamics from the perspectives of hungry people on the ground, the joint editors of this special issue contend, can we fully comprehend food’s roles within the outbreak of social conflicts, as well as its potential for re-embedding social values, and priorities, within the inner-workings of our global system.³⁶

Towards these ends, the essays included in this fifth volume of Zapruder World examine the many roles played by food within the shaping of social conflicts from a global historical perspective. Ranging from 50 B.C.E. to the twenty-first century, and surveying multiple regions and polities of varying levels of wealth and poverty, the issue’s contributions illuminate the varying ways in which food (in)security has impacted social and political (in)stability on both macro and micro scales of analysis. Although covering a sweeping chronology and an array of topics, two broad themes run through each of the volume’s essays. The first unifying thread is food’s double-edged potency, with respect to its ability to magnify, as well as soften, social and political conflicts. While control over the food supply has frequently bolstered the wealth, power, and prestige of history’s ruling classes, many of our studies show, struggles over food insecurity and hunger have often served as a kind of “spark” for popular mobilization, especially in the wake of laissez-fare capitalism. The second recurring theme is the emergence, as well as the quotidian social and political impacts, of globalization between the early-modern and contemporary periods. Beginning with the liberalization of agricultural production and distribution in eighteenth-century France and ending with the complex sociological consequences of an unbridled neo-liberalism in twenty-first century Israel, many of the issue’s articles highlight the significant roles played by food and social conflicts within the establishment, and integration, of today’s global marketplace.

In “Food Provisioning and Social Control in Ancient Rome,” Tracey E. Watts examines the complex relationship between the urban food supply, social prestige, political power, and popular agency in the Eternal City between the late-Republic and the mid-second century C.E. Ancient Rome’s “rulers and wealthy elites exerted social control to maintain stability by continuing a long history of instituting price control and subsidies on staple foods,” she contends, while also heavily regulating the city’s popular, and ubiquitous, “cooked food shops.” In an attempt to soften the blows of these harsh regulations, Rome’s ruling classes also “supplemented the diets of their social inferiors” via a handful of informal methods, such as public feasts and the “much-coveted private dinners.” However, there were limits to these methods of social control. Indeed, the plebeian classes, Watts demonstrates, “exerted independence to enhance their own food security” by maintaining urban gardens, frequenting the city’s cooked food shops, and scavenging the remains of funerary banquets and public sacrifices.

The following article is a reproduction of Louise A. Tilly’s seminal essay, “The Food Riot as a Form of Political Conflict in France,” which, similar to Watts’ study, explores conflicts over popular food provisioning between the ruling and subaltern classes. In her essay, Tilly examines France’s rapid, and disruptive, transition between “the paternalistic economic policies of the old regime” and the laissez-faire marketplace between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. In response to increasing economic liberalization within the French countryside, she points out, two distinct forms of popular resistance emerged: the entrave and taxation populaire. During these instances of popular mobilization, hungry consumers would seize control of wagons and barges filled with locally-produced grain supplies, destined for one far-off marketplace or another, and sell the supplies to local villagers or townspeople for a “just price.” According to Tilly—and channeling Thompson’s “moral economy” framework—these rural grain riots “marked the nationalization and politicization of the problem of subsistence” in early modern France and reframed “a conscious popular model of how the economy should work.”

Building upon Tilly’s foundational study, Fernando Pureza’s essay on “Food Riots, Looting, and Strikes in Brazil” explores the “the ties that connected the general strikes of 1917 and 1962 from the perspective of food riots.” Up until the general strike of 1917, he contends, food riots and lootings were often deployed in conjunction with labor strikes as strategic “repertoires of working-class revolt.” Between the 1920s and 1950s, however, “strikes and food riots no longer appeared in combination with one another,” due largely to the evolving organizational strategies of Brazil’s labor unions and Communist Party. During the general strike of 1962, Pureza demonstrates, food riots appeared not as physical manifestations of popular resistance but, instead, as a “phantasmagoria,” or a “collective historic imaginary that was no longer explicitly enacted as a form of class struggle but which nevertheless, made the upper classes fear for the security of their property.” Although abandoned by the country’s workers and labor union leaderships, in other words, the memory of subsistence-motivated popular resistance in post-World War I Brazil continued to influence the landscapes of the country’s social and political conflicts well into the mid-twentieth century.

The fourth article broadens the volume’s analytical and chronological frameworks by exploring the history of agricultural production, labor, and collective memory in twentieth century Colombia. In their essay on the “90^th Anniversary of the Banana Massacre in Colombia,” Annie Mendoza and Tashima Thomas explore the history of “violence, erasure, racial politics, and class struggles of plantation workers throughout the Caribbean” by analyzing the ways in which twentieth century Colombian novelists and contemporary visual artists have engaged with the legacy of the massacre de las bananeras. By applying the literary concept of “rememory”—or “the struggle of reconciliation and remembering to traumatic experiences that are often tethered to a landscape, a place, or collective testimonial”—Mendoza and Thomas shed new light on a tragedy that has heretofore remained “officially suppressed by governing forces in Colombia.”

The issue’s final two articles bring our historical narrative up to the twenty-first century by examining the impacts of neo-liberal globalization upon food-related conflicts in contemporary Southeast Asia and the Middle East. In “Food Riots in Bangladesh?,” Ferdous Jahan and Naomi Hossain explore the underlying socio-political dynamics behind the “so-called ‘food riots’ of 2008.” In contrast to the numerous claims made by contemporary policy analysts, Jahan and Hossain contend that “in intent, form, and repertoire” these proletarian struggles in Bangladesh “in no respects resembled what social history has taught us to think of as ‘food riots.’” Although these uprisings were triggered, at least in part, by inflated food prices and a rising cost of living, they were merely “part of a larger series of struggles over wages” and, therefore, should be primarily viewed as a kind of “collective bargaining by riot.” “There were no ‘food riots’ in Bangladesh in 2008 signalling the pains of adjustment to a market economy,” Jahan and Hossain conclude, “but garments workers’ wage struggles were nonetheless, a sign of the country’s adjustment to its newly industrial position in the global economy.”

Finally, in her study on “African Refugees, Food Provisioning, and the Declining Israeli Middle Class,” Liora Gvion explores the tensions between the “politics of provisions” and the politics of belonging in twenty-first century Israel. Centering on the activities of Marak Lewinsky (ML), a food charity organization based at Lewinsky Park in Tel Aviv, Gvion explores the complex and nuanced dynamics and meanings of voluntary food provisioning in a period of considerable social, economic, and political flux. Since the mid-2000s, she explains, Israel has served as a temporary destination for tens of thousands of African refugees and asylum seekers, many of whom have fled their countries due to economic crises, environmental pressures, and the outbreak of military conflicts. Their arrival, however, has been largely met with a more-or-less indifference, as well as a thinly veiled hostility, by Israeli authorities. Such “a lack of a formal Israeli immigration policy,” Gvion shows, has spurred non-governmental organizations and civil society groups, such as ML, to look after these refugees’ alimentary needs. By providing these homeless immigrants with daily meals, she contends, ML volunteers expressed both their “compassion, solidarity, and protest against the Israeli government that has failed to attend to the refugees’ basic needs” and, within the broader context of Israel’s “shift from a welfare state to neo-liberal politics,” their (largely imagined) identities as members of the country’s shriveling middle class “by subtly repositioning themselves between more financially well-off Israelis and the refugees at Lewinsky Park.”

In the interest of advancing a broader, more comprehensive perspective on this diverse collection of essays, we asked Amy Bentley to compose the volume’s Afterword. In her concluding comments, Bentley summarizes the issue’s contributions through the analytical lens of E.P. Thompson’s seminal 1971 essay, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” observing that either “[e]xplicitly or indirectly the authors in this special issue draw on [the latter’s] moral economy of the just price to help explain their subjects’ motives and actions.” In addition to placing the volume’s essays within this broader historiographical framework, Bentley urges her readers to acknowledge the contemporary purpose of such scholarly inquiries. In a world crippled by unnecessary, and entirely avoidable, hunger and starvation, she boldly contends, it is imperative that we “maintain our humanity” by regarding our “societal obligations in moral as well as practical terms.”

In keeping with Zapruder World’s longstanding objective of conjoining scholarship with outlets for social and political engagement, we have compiled a collection of resources that are intended as portals into, as well as beyond, the volume’s primary topics and themes. In our “Yesterday” section, for instance, we have assembled a handful of links to historical archives, digitized sources and collections, and a variety of other resources based roughly on the history of food and social conflicts. The “Today” section, by contrast, includes a number of scholarly and activist organizations centered on the unifying theme of contemporary food justice. By presenting these resources alongside the volume’s contributions, we hope to both facilitate further research on, as well as inspire contemporary socio-political engagement with, the crisis of chronic global hunger.

 

“For Those Who Yearn to Be Free”

Figure 3: A Monument to Mohammed Bouazizi in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia

Source: Fethi Belaid, 2012.

In December 2011, on the one-year anniversary of his self-immolation, a monument to Mohammed Bouazizi was unveiled at a ceremony  attended by thousands of mourners in the center of Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia (Figure 3). Commemorating the “spark” for what became the Arab Spring, the white stone memorial now “stands as a symbol of hope” for both Tunisians and, more broadly, citizens throughout the developing world.³⁷ Crafted in the likeness of Bouazizi’s humble fruit cart, however, the solemn memorial also serves as a subtle reminder of the many contributions made by poverty and hunger to the uprisings of 2011 and, more broadly, the shaping of conflicts between those who possess, and those who lack, power. “To solve the food crisis we need to fix the food system,” Eric Holt-Giménez and Loren Peabody have urged, adding that doing so would involve “re-regulating the market, reducing the oligopolistic power of the agri-foods corporations, and rebuilding agroecologically resilient peasant and smallholder agriculture.”³⁸ Such an objective, however, will require a much broader, global revolution, including, but by no means limited to, a conscious re-embedding of social values and priorities within the inner-functionings of our interconnected political and economic systems, as well as a democratization, and re-localization, of agricultural production and popular food provisioning. This collection of essays is, therefore, presented in the hopes that it is able to contribute, however modestly, to the realization of a global society in which we memorialize the abolition of hunger, rather than the perennial struggles of history’s hungry people.

 

References

Scholarly Works

Monographs & Edited Volumes

Bourguignon, François. The Globalization of Inequality. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.

Brown, Lester R. Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012.

Cullather, Nick. The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.

Dale, Gareth. Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.

Deaton, Angus. The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.

Ferguson, Niall, Charles S. Maier, Erez Manela, and Daniel J. Sargent, eds. The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2010.

King, Stephen D. Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.

Macekura, Stephen J., and Erez Mandela, eds. The Development Century: A Global History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Milanovic, Branko. Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2016.

Motta, Renata. Social Mobilization, Global Capitalism, and Struggles over Food. New York: Routledge, 2018.

Nolan, Brian, ed. Inequality and Inclusive Growth in Rich Countries: Shared Challenges and Contrasting Fortunes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Pieterse, Jan Neverdeen. Multipolar Globalization: Emerging Economies and Development. New York: Routledge, 2018.

Pistor, Katharina. The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.

Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001. Originally published in 1944.

Rist, Gilbert. The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith. London: Zed Books, 2014.

Robinson, William I. Transnational Conflicts: Central America, Social Change, and Globalization. London: Verso Books, 2003.

Rodrik, Dani. The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.

Schmalzer, Sigrid. Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Stiglitz, Joseph E. Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003.

Vernon, James. Hunger: A Modern History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Woertz, Eckart. Oil for Food: The Global Food Crisis and the Middle East. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

 

Journal Articles

Bellemare, Marc F. “Rising Food Prices, Food Price Volatility, and Political Unrest.” SSRN Electronic Journal (June 28, 2011): 1-49. Available at: https://www.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1874101.

Block, Fred, and Karl Polanyi. “Karl Polanyi and the Writing of ‘The Great Transformation.’” Theory and Society 32:3 (June 2003): pp. 275-306.

Bush, Ray. “Food Riots: Poverty, Power, and Protest.” Journal of Agrarian Change 10:1 (January 2010): 119-129.

Gana, Alia. “The Rural and Agricultural Roots of the Tunisian Revolution: When Food Security Matters.” International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food 19:2 (2012): 201-213.

Holt-Giménez, Eric, and Annie Shattuck. “Food Crises, Food Regimes and Food Movements: Rumblings of Reform or Tides of Transformation?” The Journal of Peasant Studies 38:1 (January 1, 2011): 109-144. Available at: https://www.doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2010.538578.

Lagi, Marco, Karla Z. Bertrand, and Yaneer Bar-Yam. “The Food Crises and Political Instability in North Africa and the Middle East.” arXiv:1108.2455 (August 10, 2011): 1-15. Available at: http://www.arxiv.org/pdf/1108.2455.pdf.

Mares, Teresa Marie, and Alison Hope Alkon. “Mapping the Food Movement: Addressing Inequality and Neoliberalism.” Environment and Society 2:11 (September 2011): 68-86.

Melillo, Edward D. “The First Green Revolution: Debt Peonage and the Making of the Nitrogen Fertilizer Trade, 1840-1930.” American Historical Review 117:4 (2012): 1028-1060.

Messer, Ellen, and Marc J. Cohen. “Conflict, Food Insecurity and Globalization.” Food, Culture & Society 10:2 (2007): pp. 297-315.

Otsuka, Keijuro. “Food Insecurity, Income Inequality, and the Changing Comparative Advantage in World Agriculture.” Agricultural Economics 44:1 (November 2013): 7-18.

Patel, Raj. “The Long Green Revolution.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 40:1 (2013): 1-63.

Way, Albert G., and William Thomas Okie. “Roundtable: New Narratives of the Green Revolution.” Agricultural History 91:3 (2017): 397-422.

 

Policy Reports

Food and Agriculture Organization. “World Food Price Index.” Available at: http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/foodpricesindex/en/.

Food Security and Nutrition in the Southern and Eastern Rim of the Mediterranean Basin. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization, 2016, Available at: http://www.fao.org/3/a-i3206e.pdf.

Grewal, Sharan. “A Quiet Revolution: The Tunisian Military After Ben Ali.” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (February 24, 2016). Available at: https://www.carnegieendowment.org/2016/02/24/quiet-revolution-tunisian-military-after-ben-ali-pub-62780.

Holt-Giménez, and Loren Peabody. “From Food Rebellions to Food Sovereignty: Urgent Call to Fix a Broken Food System.” Food First Backgrounder: Institute for Food and Development Policy 14:1 (Spring 2008). Available at: https://www.foodfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/BK14_1-spring-2008-Food-Rebellions.pdf.

Huppé, Gabriel A, Sabrina Shaw, Jason Dion, and Vivek Voora. “Food Price Inflation and Food Security: A Morocco Case Study.” International Institute for Sustainable Development, IISD Report (January 2013). Available at: https://www.iisd.org/pdf/2013/food_price_inflation_morocco.pdf.

“Making a Killing from Hunger: We Need to Overturn Food Policy, Now!” Against the Grain (April 2008). Available at: https://www.grain.org/media/W1siZiIsIjIwMTEvMDcvMjEvMDRfMjJfNTZfMjQ4X29yaWdpbmFsLnBkZiJdXQ.

Newman, Edward. “Food Security and Political Unrest in Tunisia: Case Study Report.” Qatar National Research Fund’s National Priorities Research Program (June 2018).

“Price Volatility in Agricultural Markets: Evidence, Impact on Food Security and Policy Responses.” Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Policy Brief 12 (December 2010). Available at: http://www.fao.org/economic/es-policybriefs/briefs-detail/en/?uid=48900.

“Rising Food Prices: Policy Options and World Bank Response.” The World Bank (April 11, 2008). Available at: https://siteresources.worldbank.org/NEWS/Resources/risingfoodprices_backgroundnote_apr08.pdf.

“Urgent Measures Required to Reduce the Impact of High Food Prices on the Poor UN Agency Chiefs Highlight Role of Agro-Industries.” FAO Newsroom (April 9, 2008).

 

Contemporary News Articles

Abouzeid, Rania. “Bouazizi: The Man Who Set Himself and Tunisia on Fire.” TIME. January 21, 2011. Available at: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2044723,00.html.

Bengali, Shashank. “Farmer Suicides Reflect Growing Desperation in Rural India.” Los Angeles Times. August 10, 2014. Available at: https://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-india-farmer-suicide-20140805-story.html.

Bergen, Peter. “Revolutions Are Unpredictable.” New York Times. March 10, 2011. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/02/24/why-didnt-the-us-foresee-the-arab-revolts/revolutions-are-unpredictable/.

Brown, Lester. “The Great Food Crisis of 2011.” Foreign Policy. January 10, 2011. Available at: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/01/10/the_great_food_crisis_of_2011/.

Buchen, Charlotte. “Egypt: Food for a Revolution.” Al Jazeera. December 21, 2011. Available at:  https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/12/20111219143454601107.html.

Cambanis, Thanassis. “The Arab Spring Was a Revolution of the Hungry.” The Boston Globe. August 23, 2015. Available at: https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2015/08/22/the-arab-spring-was-revolution-hungry/K15S1kGeO5Y6gsJwAYHejI/story.html.

Carrington, Damian. “$1M a Minute: The Farming Subsidies Destroying the World.” The Guardian. September 16, 2019. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/16/1m-a-minute-the-farming-subsidies-destroying-the-world/.

Carroll, Rory. “Haiti: Mud Cakes Become Staple Diet as Cost of Food Soars Beyond a Family’s Reach.” The Guardian. July 28, 2008. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jul/29/food.internationalaidanddevelopment.

Ciezadlo, Annia. “Let Them Eat Bread: How Food Subsidies Prevent (and Provoke) Revolutions in the Middle East.” Foreign Affairs. March 23, 2011. Available at: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/tunisia/2011-03-23/let-them-eat-bread/.

————. “The War on Bread: How the Syrian Regime is Using Food as a Weapon.” The New Republic. February 14, 2014. Available at: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116615/syrian-war-crimes-regime-bombs-bakeries-uses-starvation-weapon/.

————. “The Most Unconventional Weapon in Syria: Wheat.” The Washington Post. December 18, 2015. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-most-unconventional-weapon-in-syria-wheat/2015/12/18/781a0ae0-9cf4-11e5-bce4-708fe33e3288_story.html.

Connery, Neil. “Monument to Mohammed Bouazizi’s Humble Cart Stands as a Symbol of Hope.” ITV News. October 27, 2015. Available at: https://www.itv.com/news/2015-10-27/a-monument-to-mohammed-bouazizis-humble-cart-stands-as-symbol-of-hope/.

Cozens, William. “The Complexity of Farmers’ Suicide in India.” The Borgen Project. April 25, 2019. Available at: https://www.borgenproject.org/farmers-suicide-in-india/.

De Soto, Hernando. “The Real Mohamed Bouazizi.” Foreign Policy. December 16, 2011. Available at: https://www.foreignpolicy.com/2011/12/16/the-real-mohamed-bouazizi/.

“Egyptians Riot over Bread Crisis.” Telegraph. April 7, 2008. Available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/2787714/Egyptians-riot-over-bread-crisis.html.

Fahim, Kareem. “Slap to a Man’s Pride Set Off Tumult in Tunisia.” New York Times. January 21, 2011. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/22/world/africa/22sidi.html.

Lacey, Marc. “Across Globe, Empty Bellies Bring Rising Anger.” New York Times. April 18, 2008. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/world/americas/18food.html.

Mahapatra, Dhananjay. “Over 12,000 Farmer Suicides per Year, Centre Tells Supreme Court.” The Times of India. May 2, 2017. Available at: https://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/over-12000-farmer-suicides-per-year-centre-tells-supreme-court/articleshow/58486441.cms.

Mann, Charles C. “Can Planet Earth Feed 10 Billion People?” The Atlantic. March 2018. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/charles-mann-can-planetearth-feed-10-billion-people/550928/.

“Mexicans Stage Tortilla Protest.” BBC News. February 1, 2007. Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6319093.stm.

Pohpham, Peter. “The Price of Food Is at the Heart of This Wave of Revolutions.” Independent. February 27, 2011. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/the-price-of-food-is-at-the-heart-of-this-wave-of-revolutions-2226896.html.

Randeree, Bilal. “Tunisian Leader Promises New Jobs – Africa.” Al Jazeera. January 10, 2011. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2011/01/201111016239214548.html.

Sanburn, Josh. “A Brief History of Self-Immolation.” TIME. January 20, 2011. Available at: http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2043123,00.html.

Shiva, Vandana. “The Seeds of Suicide: How Monsanto Destroys Farming.” GlobalResearch. April 5, 2013. Available at: https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-seeds-of-suicide-how-monsanto-destroys-farming/5329947.

“Tunisia Imposes Curfew in Tunis to Quell Protests.” BBC News. January 13, 2011. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-12175959.

“Tunisia: President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali Forced Out.” BBC News. January 15, 2011. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-12195025/.

Wiggin, Addison. “The Food Crisis of 2011.” Forbes. October 27, 2010. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2010/10/27/the-food-crisis-of-2011/#209ae7df5f70/.

Zurayk, Rami. “Use Your Loaf: Why Food Prices Were Crucial in the Arab Spring.” The Observer. July 15, 2011. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/jul/17/bread-food-arab-spring/.

1. Rania Abouzeid, “Bouazizi: The Man Who Set Himself and Tunisia on Fire,” TIME (January 21, 2011), available at: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2044723,00.html.
2. Hernando De Soto, “The Real Mohamed Bouazizi,” Foreign Policy (December 16, 2011), available at: https://www.foreignpolicy.com/2011/12/16/the-real-mohamed-bouazizi/.
3. Kareem Fahim, “Slap to a Man’s Pride Set Off Tumult in Tunisia,” New York Times (January 21, 2011), available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/22/world/africa/22sidi.html.
4. Abouzeid, “Bouazizi.”
5. Annia Ciezadlo, “Let Them Eat Bread: How Food Subsidies Prevent (and Provoke) Revolutions in the Middle East,” Foreign Affairs (March 23, 2011), available at: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/tunisia/2011-03-23/let-them-eat-bread/; Alia Gana, “The Rural and Agricultural Roots of the Tunisian Revolution: When Food Security Matters,” International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food 19:2 (2012), p. 207.
6. Bilal Randeree, “Tunisian Leader Promises New Jobs – Africa,” Al Jazeera (January 10, 2011), available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2011/01/201111016239214548.html.
7. “Tunisia Imposes Curfew in Tunis to Quell Protests,” BBC News (January 13 2011), available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-12175959.
8. “Tunisia: President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali Forced Out,” BBC News (January 15, 2011), available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-12195025; Sharan Grewal, “A Quiet Revolution: The Tunisian Military After Ben Ali,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (February 24, 2016), available at: https://www.carnegieendowment.org/2016/02/24/quiet-revolution-tunisian-military-after-ben-ali-pub-62780.
9. Josh Sanburn, “A Brief History of Self-Immolation,” TIME (January 20, 2011), available at: http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2043123,00.html.
10. Thanassis Cambanis, “The Arab Spring Was a Revolution of the Hungry,” The Boston Globe (August 23, 2015), available at: https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2015/08/22/the-arab-spring-was-revolution-hungry/K15S1kGeO5Y6gsJwAYHejI/story.html; Ciezadlo, “Let Them Eat Bread”; Charlotte Buchen, “Egypt: Food for a Revolution,” Al Jazeera (December 21, 2011), available at:  https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/12/20111219143454601107.html; Ciezadlo, “The War on Bread: How the Syrian Regime is Using Food as a Weapon,” The New Republic (February 14, 2014), available at: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116615/syrian-war-crimes-regime-bombs-bakeries-uses-starvation-weapon/; Ibid., “The Most Unconventional Weapon in Syria: Wheat,” The Washington Post (December 18, 2015), available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-most-unconventional-weapon-in-syria-wheat/2015/12/18/781a0ae0-9cf4-11e5-bce4-708fe33e3288_story.html.
11. Peter Bergen, “Revolutions Are Unpredictable,” New York Times (March 10, 2011), available at: https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/02/24/why-didnt-the-us-foresee-the-arab-revolts/revolutions-are-unpredictable/.
12. Eric Holt-Giménez and Annie Shattuck, “Food Crises, Food Regimes and Food Movements: Rumblings of Reform or Tides of Transformation?,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 38:1 (January 1, 2011): p. 111, available at: https://www.doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2010.538578.
13. Ibid., p. 112.
14. Edward D. Melillo, “The First Green Revolution: Debt Peonage and the Making of the Nitrogen Fertilizer Trade, 1840-1930,” American Historical Review 117:4 (2012), pp. 1028-1060; Raj Patel, “The Long Green Revolution,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 40:1 (2013), pp. 1-63.
15. Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Albert G. Way and William Thomas Okie, “Roundtable: New Narratives of the Green Revolution,” Agricultural History 91:3 (2017), pp. 397-422.; Charles C. Mann, “Can Planet Earth Feed 10 Billion People?,” The Atlantic (March 2018), available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/charles-mann-can-planetearth-feed-10-billion-people/550928/.
16. Cullather, pp. 171-173.
17. Ibid.
18. In regard to local farmers, the mounting debt crisis has been particularly felt in India, where the numbers of farmer suicides have been steadily increasing since the 1970s. See Vandana Shiva, “The Seeds of Suicide: How Monsanto Destroys Farming,” GlobalResearch (April 5, 2013), available at: https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-seeds-of-suicide-how-monsanto-destroys-farming/5329947; Shashank Bengali, “Farmer Suicides Reflect Growing Desperation in Rural India,” Los Angeles Times (August 10, 2014), available at: https://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-india-farmer-suicide-20140805-story.html; Dhananjay Mahapatra, “Over 12,000 Farmer Suicides per Year, Centre Tells Supreme Court,” The Times of India (May 2, 2017), available at: https://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/over-12000-farmer-suicides-per-year-centre-tells-supreme-court/articleshow/58486441.cms; and William Cozens, “The Complexity of Farmers’ Suicide in India,” The Borgen Project (April 25, 2019), available at: https://www.borgenproject.org/farmers-suicide-in-india/. On the destructive role of farming subsidies, see: Damian Carrington, “$1M a Minute: The Farming Subsidies Destroying the World,” The Guardian (September 16, 2019), available at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/16/1m-a-minute-the-farming-subsidies-destroying-the-world/.
19. Holt-Giménez and Shattuck, “Food Crises, Food Regimes and Food Movements,” p. 111; Rami Zurayk, “Use Your Loaf: Why Food Prices Were Crucial in the Arab Spring,” The Observer (July 15, 2011), available at: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/jul/17/bread-food-arab-spring/.
20. Ciezadlo, “Let Them Eat Bread”; Eckart Woertz, Oil for Food: The Global Food Crisis and the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
21. “Price Volatility in Agricultural Markets: Evidence, Impact on Food Security and Policy Responses,” Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Policy Brief 12 (December 2010), p. 1, available at: http://www.fao.org/economic/es-policybriefs/briefs-detail/en/?uid=48900.
22. “Rising Food Prices: Policy Options and World Bank Response,” The World Bank (April 11, 2008), p. 1, available at: https://siteresources.worldbank.org/NEWS/Resources/risingfoodprices_backgroundnote_apr08.pdf; “Urgent Measures Required to Reduce the Impact of High Food Prices on the Poor UN Agency Chiefs Highlight Role of Agro-Industries,” FAO Newsroom (April 9, 2008). Cited in Eric Holt-Giménez and Loren Peabody, “From Food Rebellions to Food Sovereignty: Urgent Call to Fix a Broken Food System,” Food First Backgrounder: Institute for Food and Development Policy 14:1 (Spring 2008), p. 1, available at: https://www.foodfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/BK14_1-spring-2008-Food-Rebellions.pdf.
23. Holt-Giménez and Peabody, “From Food Rebellions to Food Sovereignty,” p. 1.
24. Marco Lagi, Karla Z. Bertrand, and Yaneer Bar-Yam, “The Food Crises and Political Instability in North Africa and the Middle East,” arXiv:1108.2455 (August 10, 2011), p. 4, available at: http://www.arxiv.org/pdf/1108.2455.pdf.
25. “Mexicans Stage Tortilla Protest,” BBC News (February 1, 2007), available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6319093.stm; “Egyptians Riot over Bread Crisis,” Telegraph (April 7, 2008), available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/2787714/Egyptians-riot-over-bread-crisis.html; Rory Carroll, “Haiti: Mud Cakes Become Staple Diet as Cost of Food Soars Beyond a Family’s Reach,” The Guardian (July 28, 2008), available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jul/29/food.internationalaidanddevelopment; Marc Lacey, “Across Globe, Empty Bellies Bring Rising Anger,” New York Times (April 18, 2008), available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/world/americas/18food.html.
26. Lester R. Brown, “The Great Food Crisis of 2011,” Foreign Policy (January 10 2011), available at: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/01/10/the_great_food_crisis_of_2011/; “Food: The Weak Link” in Ibid., Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012), available at: http://www.earth-policy.org/books/fpep/fpepch1; Holt-Giménez and Peabody, “From Food Rebellions to Food Sovereignty,” p. 1.
27. Addison Wiggin, “The Food Crisis of 2011,” Forbes (October 27, 2010), available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2010/10/27/the-food-crisis-of-2011/#209ae7df5f70/; Peter Pohpham, “The Price of Food Is at the Heart of This Wave of Revolutions,” Independent (February 27, 2011), available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/the-price-of-food-is-at-the-heart-of-this-wave-of-revolutions-2226896.html.
28. Pohpham, “The Price of Food Is at the Heart of This Wave of Revolutions.” For an index of global food prices, see the Food and Agriculture Organization’s “World Food Price Index”: http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/foodpricesindex/en/. On the relationship between food (in)security and the 2008 and 2011 riots, demonstrations, and uprisings, see: “Making a Killing from Hunger: We Need to Overturn Food Policy, Now!,” Against the Grain (April 2008), pp. 1-6, available at: https://www.grain.org/media/W1siZiIsIjIwMTEvMDcvMjEvMDRfMjJfNTZfMjQ4X29yaWdpbmFsLnBkZiJdXQ; Holt-Giménez and Peabody, “From Food Rebellions to Food Sovereignty”; Marc F. Bellemare, “Rising Food Prices, Food Price Volatility, and Political Unrest,” SSRN Electronic Journal (June 28, 2011), available at: https://www.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1874101; Lagi, Bertrand, and Bar-Yam, pp. 1-15; Gana, pp. 201-213; Gabriel A Huppé, Sabrina Shaw, Jason Dion, and Vivek Voora, “Food Price Inflation and Food Security: A Morocco Case Study,” International Institute for Sustainable Development, IISD Report (January 2013), available at: https://www.iisd.org/pdf/2013/food_price_inflation_morocco.pdf; Food Security and Nutrition in the Southern and Eastern Rim of the Mediterranean Basin (Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization, 2016), available at: http://www.fao.org/3/a-i3206e.pdf; Edward Newman, “Food Security and Political Unrest in Tunisia: Case Study Report,” Qatar National Research Fund’s National Priorities Research Program (June 2018).
29. “Making a Killing from Hunger,” p. 1. For more information on GRAIN, see “Organisation,” GRAIN, available at: https://www.grain.org/en/pages/organisation/.
30. Ibid. For a social, cultural, and political history of global hunger during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see James Vernon, Hunger: A Modern History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
31. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), p. 60. Originally published in 1944.
32. Ibid., p. 136.
33. Fred Block, “Karl Polanyi and the Writing of ‘The Great Transformation,’” Theory and Society 32:3 (June 2003), p. 296.
34. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, p. 122.
35. While many other studies on the history of “development” and globalization could be included, here, some of the more notable contributions include: William I. Robinson, Transnational Conflicts: Central America, Social Change, and Globalization (London: Verso Books, 2003); Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith (London: Zed Books, 2014); and Stephen J. Macekura and Erez Mandela, eds., The Development Century: A Global History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). For a specific discussion on the Green Revolution, see Cullather; Sigrid Schmalzer, Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). For a discussion on globalization’s various adverse impacts upon the West, see Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003); Niall Ferguson, Charles S. Maier, Erez Manela, and Daniel J. Sargent, eds., The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2010); Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); Stephen D. King, Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017); and Brian Nolan, ed., Inequality and Inclusive Growth in Rich Countries: Shared Challenges and Contrasting Fortunes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
36. A small but growing body of literature is beginning to draw attention to the linkages between food, social conflict, and global inequality. In addition to previously referenced works, see also Ray Bush, “Food Riots: Poverty, Power, and Protest,” Journal of Agrarian Change 10:1 (January 2010), pp. 119-129; Teresa Marie Mares and Alison Hope Alkon, “Mapping the Food Movement: Addressing Inequality and Neoliberalism,” Environment and Society 2:11 (September 2011), pp. 68-86; Keijuro Otsuka, “Food Insecurity, Income Inequality, and the Changing Comparative Advantage in World Agriculture,” Agricultural Economics 44:1 (November 2013), pp. 7-18; and Renata Motta, Social Mobilization, Global Capitalism, and Struggles over Food (New York: Routledge, 2018).
37. Neil Connery, “Monument to Mohammed Bouazizi’s Humble Cart Stands as a Symbol of Hope,” ITV News (October 27, 2015), available at: https://www.itv.com/news/2015-10-27/a-monument-to-mohammed-bouazizis-humble-cart-stands-as-symbol-of-hope/.
38. Holt-Giménez and Peabody, “From Food Rebellions to Food Sovereignty,” p. 3.