06JUL22- 'War, protest and spiking prices: How spiraling inflation is setting the world on fire As the Ukraine War rages on, driving up the cost of fuel and food, high prices have sparked unrest around the world.-

• "This is just a partial snapshot of what happened in June: In Zimbabwe, striking nurses and doctors brought state-run hospitals to a standstill for almost a week; in Ecuador, angry protesters paralyzed the capital, Quito, attacking government buildings and clashing with police; next door, in Peru and also in Argentina, truckers went on strike;

and on the other side of the world, opposition parties held protest marches across Pakistan, while in nearby Sri Lanka, a popular uprising that has already unseated the patriarch of the country’s most powerful political family as prime minister continues unabated.

In each case, the protesters — Sri Lankan students, Zimbabwean nurses, Indigenous groups in Ecuador — were demanding action to deal with spiraling prices. Welcome, in other words, to the season of inflation unrest.

“There is real, real pain. People are suffering,” Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, one of Sri Lanka’s leading political commentators and the executive director of the Colombo-based Center for Policy Alternatives, told Grid, talking about the situation in his country. “That is very visible in the popular protests we have seen.”

To be sure, in each case, there are important local factors at play. As Grid has previously reported, in Sri Lanka, a mountain of foreign debt has crushed a fragile domestic economy.

In Zimbabwe, healthcare workers, who came out to demand higher wages, saw their pay crash precipitously when the local currency collapsed in 2019. In Ecuador, in addition to calling for action to contain soaring fuel prices, protest leaders also demanded action on a variety of other fronts, including calls for right-wing President Guillermo Lasso to introduce curbs on mining projects.....(click for more stats & specs) -

https://www.grid.news/story/global/2022/07/06/war-protest-and-spiking-prices-how-spiralling-inflation-is-setting-the-world-on-fire/