Between 2007 and 2012 global food price volatility affected millions of people on low and precarious incomes. As food has been increasingly commodified and people on low incomes have struggled to pay for life's necessities, they have responded by changing their ways of making a living, residences, diets, family relationships and ways of caring for one another.

This IDS Bulletin maps out how food price volatility has played a part in global social change, showing how a multitude of micro-reactions to rising and unpredictable prices has laid the foundations for transformed societies.

Written by researchers from ten countries, each of whom carried out a longitudinal study into the impacts and effects of food price volatility over three or more years, this IDS Bulletin elucidates two critical areas.

First, it gives insights into how reactions to food price volatility led to transformations at multiple levels and second, it demonstrates the usefulness of a social research method that understands the mechanisms by which social change comes about in a macro-event like the global food crisis.

Stabilising prices will not be enough to provide development opportunities to those who have already been forced to change their way of life, for whom high prices remain a barrier to life improvements and for whom cultural change has swept away much that they once could rely on. It is time to think not only about stabilising the price of food, but also making it possible for citizens to have greater control over what and how they eat, alongside rights to care, equitable gender relations and a fair working environment.