16-09-22 / 9 min read
AUTHOR:
MOLLY LONG

“Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime,” so said Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. The meaning behind the phrase is as true today as it was when he supposedly coined it thousands of years ago. When a person’s basic needs aren’t met, they have nothing left to lose. If people don’t have access to food and shelter, what comes eventually is either civil unrest under the current system, or a new set of rules altogether. When enough people are disenfranchised, it’s often both.

Privation has been the igniting flame for many of history’s largest revolutions. It was a driving force behind the French Revolution of the late 1700s, when sky-high taxes and poor harvests pushed the labouring classes to revolt. A lack of bread due to rationing was the motivation behind the first Petrograd demonstration, which would eventually lead to the 1917 Russian Revolution. And soaring food prices were an integral part of the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011.

So intricately linked is the price and availability of food to unrest, economists have claimed to be able to work out the exact mathematical correlation between the two. In 2022, huge swathes of the world are grappling with food insecurity. In some places, the threat of civil unrest is a looming possibility. In others, it has already begun.

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Back in May, United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) Director David Beasley issued an ominous warning that these factors could coalesce and prompt “riots, famine, destabilisation, and then mass migration by necessity” if left unchecked in the years to come.

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