Food riots and food rights: the moral and political economy of accountability for hunger

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This research falls within the theme of Resource Scarcity, Growth and Poverty Reduction, addressing the question of how to mitigate the risk of social and political conflict around resource scarcity in poor and food insecure countries. The challenge of world hunger is not only about growing more food for more people with fewer resources: it is also about making sure people can access that food. This means ensuring that governments can be made to answer when they fail to protect people's access to the food they need. But how can governments be made more accountable for hunger? This research aims to answer this question. Food prices began to rise and became more erratic after 2007; at the same time, people in developing countries have taken two different approaches to making their governments more accountable for food security. One is right-to-food movements - efforts by human rights and antipoverty activists to secure and realise a legal right to food which have taken off in 20 countries over the 2000s. The second is food riots, mostly unorganised protests over sharp rises in food prices, which were seen in 60 developing countries in 2008 and others in 2011. They led to several governments falling and others acting to protect people's access to food. Some people argue that the Arab Spring was triggered by fury over the cost of food. European history shows that similar food riots have often succeeded in holding governments to a rough kind of account. But it has also shown that people rarely protest out of sheer hunger: they usually have ideas about their rights to adequate provisions, and hold government responsible for protecting them - a set of ideas known as the 'moral economy'. This research plans to look at whether and how these riots and right-to-food campaigns actually worked in this recent food crisis. By this we mean whether they triggered government action to protect people's rights to food, now and in the future. The study will take place in developing countries with large problems of poverty and hunger - Bangladesh, India, Kenya and Mozambique - where there have also been efforts to get governments to respond to people's concerns about the cost of food. To answer whether and how these efforts work to make governments more accountable, the research will ask three questions: 1) do officials and policymakers fully understand how food price rises affect people? Specifically, do they understand how quality of life, stress and the work (mainly by women) needed to keep families fed is affected by food price rises? 2) Do people hold ideas about the 'moral economy' that mean they think governments should put people's access to affordable food first? If so, what can governments do when food prices rise because of international factors not in their control? And 3) under what conditions do riots and right-to-food campaigns actually work to make governments more accountable for hunger?The research will work at two levels. First, it will study what motivates protests and other direct actions, by looking closely at such events over the food crisis (2007-12), and holding interviews and focus group discussions with activists, protestors and affected groups (particularly women on low incomes). Second it will study official statements and policy changes, and interview key officials and policymakers. It will combine findings from these two levels in an analysis of whether the protests or campaigns worked and the general conditions under which popular mobilisation is likely to increase accountability for hunger.The research will help policymakers and donor agencies understand the full impact of food price rises so that they can do better at anticipating and monitoring their effects, and protecting people against them. It will also create opportunities for activists fighting for the right to food to meet and communicate more constructively with policymakers and government officials.