by Crystal Bartolovich, 2010

In the first half of 2008, ‘food riots’ were much in the news. The streets of the global South and the television screens of the North were filled with angry protesters as the price of grains on world markets doubled or even tripled, pushing staples out of the reach of vast swathes of populations already struggling to get by. Nearly all commentators agree that the price rises that led to these disturbances were an effect of global forces, not merely local ones,such as drought or corruption, on which such unrest is typically blamed. Competition for oil, the cost of commercial seed, fertiliser and pesticide, speculation in commodities markets, shifting of grains to use for fuel rather than food, or for livestock rather than people, all have been identified as culprits. Thus, food riots raise anew – and emphatically at a global level – the question of the limits of the market in mediating the distribution of the most basic resources. At the same time, they remind us that food is still – despite the shift to ‘immaterial labour’ in many sectors of the post-Fordist economy and the continuing decrease in the percentage of the human population engaged in agricultural labour – a particularly volatile site of social struggle over concrete planetary resources. Not only does the concept of sugar not taste sweet, as Althusser was fond of saying, but you can’t put an advertisement for it in your coffee.1 Even as virtualisation technologies become ever more sophisticated, the World Food Program reminds us that 25,000 people still die in the physical world every day from hunger.2 In this context, food riots can be seen as a critique of the current determination of global priorities for the dissemination of resources, the development of technologies and the deployment of labour, as well as the failures of the market in establishing them justly. As such, they are a praxis whose theoretical implications – in addition to their practical ones– must be recognised.