Free markets & food riots

John Walton, John K. Walton, David Seddon

This book describes and explains the extraordinary wave of popular protest that swept across the so-called Third World and the countries of the former socialist bloc during the period from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, in response to the mounting debt crises and the austerity measures widely adopted as part of economic 'reform' and 'adjustment'. During the development decades of the 1960s and 1970s, governments around the world borrowed heavily to finance economic and social development, only to succumb to the global debt crisis and general recession of the 1980s. The last 15-20 years have witnessed the increasing adoption of neo-liberal austerity measures, led by the stabilization and structural adjustment programmes of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which have averted a crisis for international banks by shifting the burden to the urban poor in the less...

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