20 June 2008
Scholars See Varied Political Implications of Food Shortages
Political unrest, heightened repression are possible outcomes
Washington -- The rising prices and growing shortages of food may cause political instability but are unlikely to lead to greater democracy.
This is the conclusion drawn by two scholars, Raj Desai of the Brookings Institute and Andrew Natsios of Georgetown University, in a recent symposium at the Hudson Institute in Washington.
The important factors in assessing prospects for democratic change in the current period of global food shortages are the degree of income inequality in a country and the proportion of national wealth based on agriculture or natural resources.
Countries with great disparities of individual income and national economies based on agriculture or minerals are unlikely to advance toward democracy, according to Desai.
"In very unequal societies, the chances for democratization are slim because the median voter is poor so redistributive pressures are severe. Wealth holders are more likely to try to repress those demands through autocratic rule," Desai said.
"These distributional conflicts get worse when wealth is held in the form of specific assets, such as land, which limits the ability of holders of that wealth to exit the system. Money that cannot go anywhere tends to impede movement toward democracy," Desai said.
The Brookings scholar said rising food prices are likely to harm urban populations far more than rural residents.
"Certainly, landowners and food producers are going to benefit at the expense of net food consumers. As a result, you will not see urban groups forming populist coalitions with rural groups," Desai said.
While prospects for greater democracy are dim, the environment of food shortages may cause urban unrest, which may lead to regime changes, Desai said. Other predictable changes are shifts of wealth away from urban centers to the countryside and reductions of the gaps between rural and urban incomes, he said.
Andrew Natsios, a former chief of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and currently a professor at Georgetown University, said the fact that the current food shortages affect primarily urban areas raises the likelihood of political instability.
"No one falls in a coup from people rioting in some remote mountain village," Natsios said.
In studying four 20th-century famines that took place under totalitarian regimes, Natsios found that political repression tightened in the aftermath. This was true in Stalin's rule of the former Soviet Union in the 1930s, Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward movement in China in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Ethiopian famine that occurred during the Mengistu regime in the 1980s, and the recent North Korean famine under Kim Jong Il, he said.
"After the famines took place, there were aggressive internal measures to increase the level of oppression, which was already very substantial, in order for the people in power to recover political power they had lost during the crisis," Natsios said.
Natsios said totalitarian states with large standing armies suffer from weakened military support when massive famines occur because a large number of soldiers' relatives starve to death.
"We know at least one coup attempt took place against Kim Jong-Il as a result of the famine. There were also two military mutinies that were related to the famine. Kim Jong-Il conducted his own purges of the military to avoid a coup," Natsios said.
The former USAID chief said a famine has not occurred so far in a democracy because democracies have institutions that are responsive to the needs of their citizens, with India as a prime example.
"India had famines for thousands of years, but since independence, it has not had one," he said.
