Between 2007 and 2012 global food price volatility affected millions of people on low and precarious incomes. As food has been increasingly commodified and people on low incomes have struggled to pay for life’s necessities, they have responded by changing their ways of making a living, residences, diets, family relationships and ways of caring for one another.
This IDS Bulletin maps out how food price volatility has played a part in global social change, showing how a multitude of micro-reactions to rising and unpredictable prices has laid the foundations for transformed societies.
Written by researchers from ten countries, each of whom carried out a longitudinal study into the impacts and effects of food price volatility over three or more years, this IDS Bulletin elucidates two critical areas.
First, it gives insights into how reactions to food price volatility led to transformations at multiple levels and second, it demonstrates the usefulness of a social research method that understands the mechanisms by which social change comes about in a macro-event like the global food crisis.
Stabilising prices will not be enough to provide development opportunities to those who have already been forced to change their way of life, for whom high prices remain a barrier to life improvements and for whom cultural change has swept away much that they once could rely on. It is time to think not only about stabilising the price of food, but also making it possible for citizens to have greater control over what and how they eat, alongside rights to care, equitable gender relations and a fair working environment.
Article titles:
- Introduction: How Prices Rose and Lives Changed
- From Global to Local and Back Again: Researching Life in a Time of Food Price Volatility
- Anomaly or Augury? Global Food Prices Since 2007
- Disaggregated Analysis: The Key to Understanding Wellbeing in Kenya in the Context of Food Price Volatility
- Macro Events and Micro Responses: Experiences from Bolivia and Guatemala
- Eat With Us: Insight into Household Food Habits in a Time of Food Price Volatility in Zambian Communities
- The Role of Fatalism in Resilience to Food Price Volatility in Bangladesh
- Food Prices and the Politics of Hunger: Beneath Market and State
- Food Price Volatility in Ethiopia: Public Pressure and State Response
- How to Support Poor Vietnamese Consumers to Deal with Food Price Volatility and Food Safety Issues
- Food Price Volatility and the Worrying Trend in Children’s Snacking in Indonesia
- Life Around the Firewood Stove: The Impact of Price Volatility
- Social Change, New Food Habits and Food Price Volatility in Burkina Faso
- ‘Tell Me What You Eat and I’ll Tell You Who You Are’: Changing Eating Habits in Cochabamba, Bolivia