T N Ninan: Blame climate change!

The surge in global food prices in 2010 began with a Russian heatwave, followed by problems in Canada and Argentina, and now floods in Australia

So what caused the French Revolution? Food prices did. A hailstorm destroyed French crops, food prices rose 88 per cent in one year, and hungry Parisians turned on their rulers. Ditto with the Tian-an-men showdown exactly 200 years later, in 1989: consumer prices rose 21 per cent in a country that had known virtually no inflation under Communist rule. The Suharto regime got overthrown in Indonesia in 1998 after food prices doubled in a year; and the sharp spurt in food prices in 2008 caused food riots in Haiti and Somalia. As they say, no country is more than three meals away from a revolution. So no prizes for guessing what may have caused, or at least contributed to, the riots in Tunisia and Algeria recently; the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s food price index surged 32 per cent in the second half of 2010. Reports mention residents of Tunis looting shops that stocked flour, sugar and milk.

In India, Indira Gandhi nationalised the wholesale trade in foodgrain, in a drought year. Food prices rose 20 per cent in 1972 and a further 32 per cent in 1973. The nationalisation was hastily reversed, but the dam had to burst. Reacting to sharply higher mess bills, students in an engineering college in Gujarat began a protest that spread like wildfire, all the way to distant Bihar, where Jayaprakash Narayan used the opportunity to launch a countrywide agitation against what he called a corrupt government.

Elsewhere too, the riots were not caused by food prices alone. In almost all cases, there was innate dissatisfaction with the government, the alienation being caused usually by tales of widespread corruption. Marie Antoinette had the image of a profligate queen, the Indira Gandhi government was besieged with corruption scandals in the early 1970s, and the Suharto government had become an international symbol of kleptocracy in the 1990s. More recently, there have been reports of many tonnes of gold being shipped overseas by the ousted Tunisian president’s wife, while Hosni Mubarak’s overseas assets are said to be worth $70 billion. What truth there is to these numbers is impossible to tell; the important thing is that the public became willing to believe the worst about their rulers (like the fictional story that gained currency about Marie Antoinette saying people should eat cake if they did not have bread).

Unemployment among the young has been another factor in the countries that have got convulsed. Educated unemployment was a fact of life for most young people in the India of the 1970s. Egypt (which has subsidised food) has seen its economy slowing down in recent years, so unemployment could have become an issue—look at the preponderance of young faces in Tahrir Square. The lack of liberty would also be a factor. But while all these create innate dissatisfaction, the trigger that causes a boiling over is sharply rising food prices.

So what about India 2011? The media are full of corruption stories, and food prices have surged a cumulative 40 per cent inflation in the last 24 months. There is palpable alienation and cynicism. But staple foodgrains have been less affected than other food items. Also, there is no frustration among the young; survey-based findings suggest that most Indians are optimistic about the future. So India may not be a good candidate for street protests. More important, therefore, is the fact that the surge in global food prices in 2010 began with a Russian heatwave that killed its wheat crop. This was followed by weather problems in Canada and Argentina, and now floods in Australia. Climate change may have begun to topple governments!