The politics of bread and micropolitical resistance (2) The political economy of bread in Syria This section analyzes the political economy of bread in Syria since the Baath party rise to power in 1963. It provides a brief historical account of the political, economic, and environmental cost of providing low-priced bread to pacify the population. Agriculture was the main economic activity in Syria until the mid-1970s. By 2010, it still represented 15 percent of the GDP and 800,000 worked in this sector of the economy, representing 17 percent of the labor force.44 Prior to the uprising, the livelihood of 80 percent of the rural population, representing 8 million Syrians, depended on agriculture.45 When the Baath party took power in 1963, seven years before Hafez al-Assad’s coup d’état, one of its priorities was to alter the food economy in Syria. Wheat and cotton became the two most important crops for the government. Cotton was a cash crop that brought much-needed hard curr...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51