The green revolution and the global integration of food markets were supposed to relegate scarcity to the annals of history. So why did thousands of people in dozens of countries take to the streets when world food prices spiked in 2008 and 2011? Are food riots the surest route to securing the right to food in the 21st century?

The research synthesised here interrogates this moment of historical rupture in the global food system through comparative analysis of Bangladesh, India, Kenya and Mozambique in the period 2007-12. This was a period of intensely volatile food prices as well as unusual levels of food-related popular mobilisation - unruly political events like riots but also more organised action like the Right to Food Movement in India. During the global food crisis of 2007-08 alone, ‘food riots’ (or subsistence protests) were reported in up 
to 30 countries. In many, including the four in our study, the food crisis triggered changes in domestic food security arrangements. Did popular mobilisation effect or influence such changes? Did new policies and programmes institutionalise action to address hunger in a time when food markets have become markedly more globalised 
and volatile? What beliefs and expectations drive people on low and precarious incomes to protest – in the face of the possibility of violent repression and the challenges of organising? How do they organise to demand protection against food crises?

The core insight of the research is summarised in the title: Them Belly Full (But We Hungry) refers to the moral fury aroused by the knowledge that some people are thriving while – or because – others are going hungry. This anger rejects gross inequalities of power and resources as intolerable; it signals that food inequalities have a particularly embodied power – that food is special. Food unites and mobilises people to resist.