“They’re talking about tomatoes, aubergines, peppers. But just think about the price of bullets. Think of what the cost is to equip our soldiers to fight terrorists. But you’re still talking about tomatoes, potatoes, peppers.”
This pronouncement was made recently by Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Dismissing the dire state of the Turkish economy in recent months he basically urged Turkish citizens not to complain about the increasing price of food and other essential commodities but instead focus their efforts on the country’s ongoing four-decade-old war against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the southeast.
As if to one up the president, Devlet Bahçeli, a political ally of Erdoğan, dismissed complaints about rising food prices by blithely declaring that nobody dies from not eating aubergines.
This isn’t the first time the Turkish leader appeared to be completely out of touch with the reality of life for ordinary Turks. When the value of the Turkish Lira hugely decreased last year as a result of tensions between Ankara and the United States Erdoğan dismissed the severity of the situation out of hand. From his opulent multi-million dollar 1,150-room palace, the Turkish president urged Turks to sell their foreign currency to buy more liras and even went so far as to declare: “If they have the dollar, then we have Allah.”
Erdoğan seems to have forgotten the simple fact that unstable food prices have an enormous significance for Middle East politics and stability. Leaders in the region who show ignorance of that elementary fact, which he is doing by making such comments, can hardly expect support from the masses for long nor preside over stable countries.
Journalist Patrick Cockburn once gave a very interesting account of one Shia Muslim Iraqi man visiting Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr and simply asking that cleric what the price of tomatoes at the local market were. When Sadr gave him the correct answer about the prices of various tomatoes the man was satisfied, explaining to Sadr’s confused disciple that the most important thing for him when choosing a religious leader to follow was that he be “one who knows my suffering, who is close to the poor and the disinherited.”
That was during the 1990s when Iraq was isolated diplomatically and embargoed as a result of the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the Iraqi people suffered chronic food shortages. This saw thousands of the most vulnerable, the very old and the very young, perish from malnourishment. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was clearly isolated from the plight of the ordinary citizen back then. While he did utilize the suffering of ordinary Iraqis for propaganda purposes against the West, particularly the United States, he was busy planning large and costly architectural projects, including a mosque larger than any other in the world, and having new palaces built for his own personal use while the Iraqi people went hungry.
The Sadr’s, on the other hand, remained a powerful force in Iraq to this day due to their populism that frequently champions the needs of Iraq’s poor, which resonates with many poor Iraqi Shia for obvious reasons. It was, therefore, no surprise that the son of Muhammad Sadiq, Muqtada al-Sadr, led a campaign that came first in the Iraqi elections last year. That campaign primarily promulgated Iraqi nationalism and railed against the rampant corruption in the country.
Muqtada had previously led a massive protest that briefly stormed the Green Zone government compound in Baghdad back in 2016. He was clearly riding on the momentum of Iraqis who were fed up of their politicians living in complete isolation to the realities of life for ordinary Iraqis behind the walls of that enormous compound. In many cases, a lot of Iraqi politicians who spend most of their time in the luxurious setting of the Green Zone likely do not know the price of tomatoes in the local market.
In recent years in Iraq, there has also been a direct link between water scarcity and political violence.
Syria was also a poor country before the outbreak of the civil war in 2011. During the initial revolt that sparked that war, many ordinary Syrians demanded very basic things.
“We want jobs. We want cheap bread,” many of them chanted.
According to Professor Joshua Landis, an expert on Syria, this came as a result of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad neglecting the economy for so long, claiming that Syria had to instead focus on various conspiracies against it from the outside. This resulted in a failure of the regime to “produce growth rates, to put a chicken in every pot, and to bring Syrians out of this terrible poverty that has been pushing the bottom.”
While Assad did reform and modernise the country to a certain extent that ultimately ended up creating a patronage system of a small wealthy elite and a large income gap.
Then high inflation and the rise of commodity prices worldwide “hammered the lower classes and the rural classes.”
In the year before the revolution the “average basket of goods that a Syrian eats went up by about 30 percent” while food prices for the likes of wheat had increased by 100 percent. In retrospect, this was clearly unsustainable.
Food subsidies are often important for the survival of Middle East regimes. For two days in January 1977 Egyptians suddenly spontaneously rioted in most cities across the country. Those hundreds-of-thousands of poorer Egyptians were protesting against the government Cairo for accepting an IMF condition to eliminate food subsidises in return for loans. When Egyptian President Anwar Sadat agreed to this the price of food increased by about 50 percent. After two days of violent riots, in which scores of people were killed and the army had to intervene, Sadat reversed course and did not implement the IMF’s demand. The enormity of the riots and how rapidly they escalated without a clear leadership underscored the reliance so many Egyptians had on basic food subsidies and the lengths they would go to ensure they were not cancelled.
Today’s Egypt introduced new food subsidies regulations to reduce the number of Egyptians who can avail of this service. While its stated purpose is to reduce the number of less needy receiving cheaper food through government food stamps it has nevertheless risen “fears of how the changes might affect the poorest Egyptians.”
“Bread riots” of this kind were also an “intermittent feature of Iranian politics since the time of the Constitutional Revolution,” of 1905-11 up until the mid-20th century, wrote Iranian Professor Abbas Milani in his 2011 biography The Shah. “Moreover, since the advent of World War II, when food shortages had become a fact of life in Iran, Britain often used delivery of grain – much of it actually gifts to Iran from the United States – as a bargaining chip against the Iranian government.”
Food politics would later become a factor that undermined the last Shah of Iran’s regime. When the Iranian ruler marked the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian Empire with a ceremony beside the ancient ruins of Persepolis in 1971 he invited several prominent world leaders. All of the ceremony’s gourmet food was airlifted in from Maxims restaurant in Paris. Iranians, including some in the Shah’s government, questioned why Persian food, itself delicious and unique, could not have been served if the event were truly to mark the achievements of Iran over the preceding 2,500 years.
“We knew that the gaps between the rich and poor, between the standing army that guarded the Shah and all those spoiled rich people who lived in fancy villas and had food flown in from Paris on Concordes… That couldn’t go on,” recalled Reuven Merchav, the chief of the Israeli Mossad agency’s Iran station in the 1970s, in a recent documentary.
Over the past year, there have been protests all across Iran, the most serious in the last decade, over the dire economic situation in the country, that has seen a significant rise in food and fuel prices which affect the poor first and foremost. Keeping the price of such goods low has been key for the regime to pacify the population. The Iranian economy is suffering its worst downturn in decades, recently exacerbated by the introduction of new U.S. economic sanctions. The Iranian currency, the Rial, reached a historic low last year. The World Bank predicts that the Iranian economy will suffer a recession and even stagflation well into 2020, all fuelled by lack of growth and high unemployment. The fact that these intermittent protests began over a year ago in the northeastern Iranian shrine city of Mashhad, arguably the most conservative city in the country, and has largely consisted of “working class under-25s who have suffered the most under Iran’s sluggish economy” is a striking indication of just how deep the discontentment over government mismanagement is across the country.
As with other regimes that have firmly held onto the reigns of power for too long the current regime in Tehran is proving stagnant, unresponsive and, most critically, unimaginative when it comes to devising long-term solutions for pulling Iran and its people out of this crisis. This isn’t at all surprising considering how long this regime and its vanguards has been in power and how it garnered tremendous wealth, not wholly unlike the Shah and his lackeys in the latter years of the old regime.
Today both the Iranian regime and Erdoğan’s regime are clearly failing to learn from the history of the region, which invariably demonstrates the crucial importance of keeping food prices and the broader economy stable and both understanding and appreciating the needs of the masses over which they preside. They fail to do so at their own peril.
Photo: Umair Abbasi