What caused the Arab Spring?

By Nitin Bajaj

Of all the fundamental and strengthening pillars that liberty stands on, hunger deprivation has to be the first. Life without food is like fire without heat and light, the only thing it bestows and tends to is darkness; sheer darkness. And when darkness prevails, human dignity leaves. Such is the story of the Arab Spring: a revolution whose imminence, like many other revolutions, became apparent when the pressure cooker amassed enough steam that it could no longer contain, but which is unlike others in the way that this cooker didn’t have any food cooking in it. The fact that the revolution mushroomed as a result of the self-immolation of a Tunisian, who was a vegetable seller, is testimony to the role of food scarcity and its consequences in this revolution. My hypothesis is that the Arab Spring was an economic phenomenon within nations before it became a political crisis across nations. Therefore, I believe it is a story of political terms and economic realities. There is substantial evidence to prove that the food security situation had been acute in the years leading to the uprising and how it became even more intense during a few months before the actual demonstrations – which deposed long-standing autocratic rulers – took place. I would like to analyze the food security situation around its four fundamental dimensions of measurement, i.e. availability, access, utilization, and distribution- to show how it led to such decisive political upheaval. I find that acute food insecurity leading to or coupled with other dismal macroeconomic factors led to the widespread distress amongst the populace, which in turn ignited the uprisings.

From 2006 onwards, there was a huge worldwide pressure on the demand, and especially, the supply side of the food prices as a result of a combination of factors that included, but were not limited to – climate change, increasing fuel costs, changing structure of demand, and strengthening linkages among different agricultural commodity markets. Then came the food crisis of 2007-8, and the FAO World food price index, which stood at 126 points in 2006, soared to a whooping 200 points by 2008 (FAO Food Price Index). This translated to an immense price increase of food commodities worldwide, and was there to stay and eventually manifest in the form of public outcry in several Arab countries. The answer to why the increased food prices around the world had such jeopardizing effects in the domestic Arab markets is not difficult to miss. For decades, the Arab dictators, giving in to the system of what Dr. Rami Zurayk, author of “Food, Farming and Freedom: Sowing the Arab Spring,” would call the “market fundamentalism of the international neo-liberal economic order,” had neglected the agriculture sector and domestic farming, at large. During this time, only value added foods, i.e. fruits and vegetables, were exported by wealthy opportunistic producers and other commodities, like wheat, were imported in large quantities. This led not only to the degradation of the farms and the agriculture sector but also to a large number of rural farmers metamorphosing into urban poor. The legendary Indian journalist, P. Sainath, would call it the drive towards corporate farming predicated by the predatory commercialization of the countryside.

Many of the MENA (Middle East and North African) countries depended hugely upon wheat and other essential commodities to be imported from the rest of the world. In 2010 alone, Arab countries imported 65.8 million MT of cereals, which is considerably more than the 58.8 million MT of Asian imports in the same year, consumed by a population which is about 20 times bigger than that of the Arab countries (United States Department of Agriculture). As the world food prices rose, there followed a Russian drought and subsequent wildfire that destroyed about one third of the country’s wheat crops in 2010. Russia, the fifth largest wheat exporter in the world, is the paramount source of wheat imports for many of the MENA countries. The years leading to 2011 entrenched panic in the state machinery due in part, to their inability to procure enough food and to the highly adverse balance of trade. Inflation and unemployment were prolific and people quickly lost their entitlement to food.

Adam Smith, in his classical 1776 work, The Wealth of Nations, had talked about the gravity of the problems that can arise as a result of excessive dependence on offshore production of commodities. This is what happened in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya and Syria. Noam Chomsky, the famous MIT professor, has called it the shifting from domestic production of useful goods to financial manipulation. So, the availability and distribution of food were prominent factors that became important in starting the Arab uprisings.

As food prices rose, loss in employment opportunities became widespread and people’s access to food declined. Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen had an unemployment rate of 40%, 53% and 67%, respectively in 2009. And a big proportion of that unemployed population was young people in the age group of 18-29. In Egypt alone, 90% of the unemployed people were younger than 29 (International Food Policy Research Institute). In fact, in Tunisia, many of the traders who sold fruits and vegetables on the streets had university degrees. Unemployment was certainly a prominent precedent for the people’s revolt. As Joel Beinin, one of America’s foremost middle-east scholars, said, “Successes of the Arab Spring are closely correlated to the existence of militant labor movement.” The ordinary man’s inability to command food blew the covers of all, from Mubarak’s subsidized “aish” distribution to Colonel Gaddafi’s system of “Jamahiriya,” which was an unusual mix of capitalist and socialist policies.

For years, marginalized people at the bottom of the ladder – of whom, there is no scarcity, as Egypt and Yemen together have 40% of their population below poverty line – had suffered disproportionately. They survived on cheap low-quality imported food. The states reduced incentives to seek innovative solutions to the growing food security problem (Ibrahim Saif). As a CGIAR (Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research) report says, a vicious cycle of land/natural resources degradation and poverty was sustained. The effect on individual livelihoods had made the health indicators of these countries some of the worst in the world. Yemen had over 40% of its children under the age of 5 classified as underweight. Libya, in 2008, had more than 27% of its population suffering from obesity (CIA figures). In fact, the obesity was prevalent in almost all of these countries, and is a clear-cut testimony to the poor food quality. This indicates a severe dampening of the food utilization in these countries.

It was a major food crisis that developed over years and unleashed its potential devastating force as translated in to political mass movements. As I think more about the Arab Spring and try to analyze it, there’s one idiom that keeps bouncing back to my mind. It is the one invented by the erstwhile U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, when he said, “the nuclear threat from Al-Qaeda is a ‘known unknown’.” The food crisis was so apparent and it is hardly inappropriate to point it out as one of the main causes of the uprisings, yet, the extent to which it would lead people to react was never known, in other words, an unknown.

All initial protests that burgeoned in to widespread demonstrations came with public demands for government action on the rising food prices. And when the government couldn’t help, the protests exacerbated. These aforementioned statements are in cognizance with the popular literature on the subject, which points out the highly causal and statistically significant relationship flowing from the food price levels to the political unrest in a country (e.g. see Bellemare, Marc, 2011). The small scale farmers and the rural population at large – which scratches its living from the soil – were unable to integrate with the global economies of scale. The production-based entitlements to food of people were deteriorated over a longer period of time as result of government’s negligence towards domestic production of essential commodities. On the other hand, as the loss of people’s own-labor based entitlements, i.e. the gain of entitlements from one’s own labor, was a later process.

The food losses incurred by the people on account of clientelistic systems, which the dictators created to keep themselves in power, were immense. The urban population could no longer make a transition back to the villages to grow their own food and what ensued would have to be written in history books using a political vocabulary.