Why Do Food Riots Happen?

This from Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved, which is in the mail to me currently (I’ll post a review, perhaps). Patel asks what makes food riots happen. He initially considers some basic indicators: high food prices and poverty, before indicating that neither of these (by themselves or in combination), are sufficient to explain food riots. He continues,

Historically, there are two things to look out for. The first is a sudden and severe entitlement gap, a gap between what people believe they’re entitled to and what they can in fact achieve. Agricultural price rises have risen because of a perfect storm of biofuels, meat consumption, oil price rises and bad harvests.

Then he adds government responsiveness to citizen demands/needs, and discusses the ways in which even ‘good’ governments, that really want to feed their citizens, are constrained from meeting these needs by international financial policies dictated by organizations like the World Bank.