Tony Karon: A 'Revolutionary' Moment in Egypt? We've seen a relatively sudden rash of food riots. (See map here.) Global food prices have risen 80% over the last three years, costs that have more than a little to do with the run up in the price of oil. These costs are causing some people to feel the pinch worse than others. Karon sees Mubarak's regime in Egypt, which has heavily subsidized the cost of bread for many years now, as especially vulnerable. This wouldn't be the first time for bread to be central to a revolution: Karon cites the French Revolution and the Soviet Revolution as two examples.

Moreover, when the source of that hunger is not the absence of food per se, but the invisible barrier of social inequalities that stand between poor people and the food supplies their poverty denies them, things can turn pretty nasty, pretty quickly. And that's precisely what we're seeing right now: As Josette Sheeran of the UN World Food Program put it last month, "We are seeing food on the shelves but people being unable to afford it."

That's a situation in which people start to question the very property relations that stand between them and those sacks of rice and bags of beans piled up behind that storefront grill and the riot policemen in front of it. Absent those property relations, all that stands between angry, hungry people and a square meal for the night are a couple of locks or windows to smash, and gendarmes that can be politely, or impolitely, persuaded to give way.

Food prices are significantly up in the US as well. I haven't seen much inclination to directly blame the Bush administration for this, although one can identify various piles of smoldering leaves that could break out at any time. The Iraq war has disabled a major short term supplier of oil. The various sanctions against Iran has shorted another. Bush's pissing contest with Russia over anti-missile defense doesn't help, and the whole Caspian region is bothered by Bush's belligerence. The one group that's not hurt by high oil prices is the oil industry, and Bush is especially close to them -- both directly to the oil companies and to the financial networks stoked by oil profits. It doesn't take advanced mathemtatics to add these interests up.

There's also the ongoing trade deficits, especially with China -- which is getting a shitload of bad publicity lately; wonder why? -- which in turn bolsters China's competition for what oil is available. Plus the whole thing is being paid for with US dollars, which have lost about half their value in 7+ Bush years. He doesn't get a lot of blame for that, either, but with the whole world financial system lurching toward collapse you wonder how long that will last.

Of course, it's not just Bush. There are two levels of limits, two levels of scarcity, at work here. One is systemic, the other political. We always hit the political ones first, so the tendency is to dismiss them as just bad politics. The late 1970s oil crisis is a classic case: politically-driven scarcity that opened up into a glut. But this time is different: oil is at or real close to peak production, and that underlies the price spikes, although it isn't the main factor at the moment. Food is less clear, but long term it is certainly clear that food production will diminish if energy inputs (which currently means oil) decline. We may just be seeing political effects right now, but they provide a preview of a future where more people will try to survive on less oil. It doesn't look pretty.