Over in Tunisia - the cradle of the Arab Spring protests - people have taken to the streets as the government has been forced to raise the prices of certain staples, including milk and eggs. In Iraq, there were protests in the south of the country earlier this year amid sharp increases in the price of cooking oil and flour. Protests in Chile in late March were driven by demands for an increase in food subsidies.
The impact on food prices has already sparked unrest. Compared with January, wheat prices, for example, are more than a third higher, according to the latest World Bank figures. With war blocking critical supply routes in the Black Sea, the cost of these essentials has gone through the roof. “It exacerbated the problem,” Sperrfechter said.Īs Grid has reported, Russia and Ukraine are central to the world’s food supply, the starting point, in fact, in the supply chain that brings basics such as wheat, barely and sunflower oil to places as far afield as Egypt, Lebanon, Thailand and Indonesia. The invasion of Ukraine has added fuel to the inflationary fire, driving up food and fuel prices globally. This is something that was already materializing last year,” as the world began emerging from the pandemic, which, among other things, widened inequalities.Īnd then, Sperrfechter pointed out, came the war in Ukraine. “You see, for example, inflation not just in emerging markets, but also in the U.S., the U.K., in the eurozone at record highs. “This is definitely a global problem,” Kimberley Sperrfechter, an economist at the London-based economic consultancy Capital Economics, told Grid.
Britain’s former leader Gordon Brown recently said inflation was a “global problem that needs a global solution.” In Ireland, the government is looking at ways of stepping up public spending to help ease the pressure on an increasingly discontented population, after thousands took to the streets to protest against an inflationary surge not seen since the 1980s. On the other side of the Atlantic, prices are also rising across the eurozone and in the U.K. is at a 40-year high as Grid has reported, ordinary consumers are seeing prices go up everywhere, in energy, in food and in housing. The pain is being felt worldwide - in less well-off, emerging and developed economies. In Ecuador, in addition to calling for action to contain soaring fuel prices, protest leaders also demanded action on a variety of other fronts, including calls for right-wing President Guillermo Lasso to introduce curbs on mining projects.īut rising prices are - despite the vast distances separating these and other countries where ordinary people have taken to the streets - a common thread, as significant swathes of the world experience inflationary spikes in the aftermath of the pandemic. In Zimbabwe, healthcare workers, who came out to demand higher wages, saw their pay crash precipitously when the local currency collapsed in 2019. As Grid has previously reported, in Sri Lanka, a mountain of foreign debt has crushed a fragile domestic economy. To be sure, in each case, there are important local factors at play. “That is very visible in the popular protests we have seen.” People are suffering,” Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, one of Sri Lanka’s leading political commentators and the executive director of the Colombo-based Center for Policy Alternatives, told Grid, talking about the situation in his country.
Welcome, in other words, to the season of inflation unrest. In each case, the protesters - Sri Lankan students, Zimbabwean nurses, Indigenous groups in Ecuador - were demanding action to deal with spiraling prices.
This is just a partial snapshot of what happened in June: In Zimbabwe, striking nurses and doctors brought state-run hospitals to a standstill for almost a week in Ecuador, angry protesters paralyzed the capital, Quito, attacking government buildings and clashing with police next door, in Peru and also in Argentina, truckers went on strike and on the other side of the world, opposition parties held protest marches across Pakistan, while in nearby Sri Lanka, a popular uprising that has already unseated the patriarch of the country’s most powerful political family as prime minister continues unabated.
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