Technoliberalism: Who claims responsibility for food insecurity

Abstract

The paper refers to my work on “Globale Getreidemärkte” (Global Grain Trade) and situates itself within the studies about the infrastructures of finance. Its main concern is to analyse the new assemblages of price building mechanisms on the market side of the food system (predominately located in the Global North) shaping human access to grain and bread on the consumption side (frequently poor people in the Global South). Market actors in the field are grain logistics companies like Cargill, investment banks such as Goldman Sachs, and high-frequency traders – for example, Virtu Financial and their algorithms that are now dominating digital trading in agricultural commodities. This is increasingly a high-speed trade in the nanosecond range. Contracts about future prices of wheat are forged in the “Speed of Light” (MacKenzie 2021). In this paper I will argue that food price increases – and ultimately hunger – only become understandable in the context of “technoliberalisation”, that is, the interaction of neoliberalism, technology and knowledge production. The paper reveals how the interlocking of market-liberal practices with digitalised technology and increasingly privatised research give rise to new assemblages and practices that ultimately create social (food) insecurities. How this is associated with the shift from human price building “in the pits” in Chicago, institutionalized as open outcry, to a digitalized, automated trade between co-habiting “machines” will be discussed in the paper. A crucial question to answer is about the fading social responsibilities associated with this shift. Why are millions of people hungry, while others make a fortune – and nobody seems responsible?