Market Logics and Moral Economies During Tunisia’s Shortages Crisis
Joshua E. Rigg
Market Logics and Moral Economies During Tunisia’s Shortages Crisis
MECAM Papers English | 2024
Abstract
Between 2021 and 2024, Tunisia experienced shortages across a range of foodstuffs, including flour, sugar, milk, rice, and coffee. Despite warnings to the contrary, these shortages did not result in the social unrest predicted by the bread riot thesis. To explain this empirical anomaly, this MECAM paper considers how these shortages were felt, negotiated, and made sense of in the everyday.
Tunisians, while cognisant of food shortages as an expression of the failures of the national and international political economy, authored a range of local strategies to lessen the accompanying effects and redistribute goods.
Shortages changed Tunisians’ experience of economic exchange in both time and space. They were perceived to have deepened socio-spatial inequalities at the national, regional, and local level, leaving the poor most vulnerable to the maldistribution of foodstuffs. Shortages also produced a sense of time as both sped up – supply could not keep up with demand – and slowed down – customers spent their days queuing and waiting for deliveries.
At the level of the neighbourhood, shortages were negotiated through a moral economy of supply, distribution, and consumption, combining ideas of market rationality with ethical justifications. In both recognising hierarchies of need among neighbourhood residents and the market logics of price and profit, customers and shopkeepers alike articulated local understandings of how food markets should operate in times of scarcity.
Context
Shortages in Tunisia have not resulted in the overt politics of bread riots. Nevertheless, citizens made ethical claims regarding the just distribution of goods. While this does not preclude overt political unrest in the future, it suggests that the bread riot thesis, with its prioritising of claim-making against the state, has overlooked the market as an arena of social intervention.
Ghana and Tunisia have often been framed as beacons of democracy in their respective regions. However, as Ghana’s democracy matured over decades, Tunisia’s experiment ultimately collapsed. This paper examines diverse factors shaping their paths, offering lessons on the risks of democratic backsliding.
