Are Investors Contributing to the Global Food Crisis?

[proud2BlibKansan]

Speculating in Hunger: Are Investors Contributing to the Global Food Crisis?

by Ellen Brown

http://www.opednews.com


Investment newsletters are now featuring headlines like "How You Can Profit from the Global Food Crisis." The recommended investments include agribusiness stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that speculate in agricultural commodities. These investments will no doubt do very well in the global food crisis; but before you put your money down, you may want to explore whether you will be helping to alleviate the problem or actually contributing to it. Do you really want to "invest" in starvation? In an April 23 article in the German news source Spiegel Online called "Deadly Greed: The Role of Speculators in the Global Food Crisis," Balzli and Horning note, "Many investors . . . are simply oblivious to the fact that by investing in the global casino, they could be gambling away the daily food supply of the world's poorest people."1

Jean Ziegler, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, has called the exploding food crisis "a silent mass murder." In an interview in the French daily Liberation on April 14, he said, "We are heading for a very long period of rioting, conflicts waves of uncontrollable regional instability marked by the despair of the most vulnerable populations." He blamed globalization and multinationals for "monopolizing the riches of the earth," and said that a mass uprising of starving people against their persecutors is "just as possible as the French Revolution was."

In some places, in fact, this is already happening. In Haiti, where the cost of rice has nearly doubled since December, the prime minister was fired this month by opposition senators after more than a week of riots over the cost of staple foods. Violent protests over food prices have been set off in Bangladesh, where rice has also doubled; in the Ivory Coast, where food prices have soared by 30 to 60 percent from one week to the next; and in Egypt, Uzbekistan, Yemen, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and Italy. In an April 21 Wall Street Journal article titled "Load Up the Pantry," Brett Arends observed that the food riots now seen in the developing world could soon be affecting Americans as well. Rocketing food prices are not a passing phase but are actually accelerating. He recommends hoarding food – not because he is actually expecting a shortage, but as an investment, because "food prices are already rising here much faster than the returns you are likely to get from keeping your money in a bank or money-market fund." Arends goes on:

"The main reason for rising prices, of course, is the surge in demand from China and India. Hundreds of millions of people are joining the middle class each year, and that means they want to eat more and better food. A secondary reason has been the growing demand for ethanol as a fuel additive. That's soaking up some of the corn supply."2

http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_ellen_br_080428_speculating_in_hunge.htm

[whistle]

1. Investors? Oh, you mean the Big Central Banks who have been buying up

...food commodities futures with over a trillion dollars in newly printed fiat money given to them at very low interest rates by the Federal Reserve. It's all a scam to manipulate prices and gouge the public

[glowing]

2. agree..

[grasswire]

3. yes

apparently so.

[marmar]

4. This corporate tyranny that runs the world has got to end.....

..... The people have got to reclaim the commons.

[Mind_your_head]

7. Agreed eom

[Robbien]

5. Last fall the US changed the rules on speculation thus opening the flood gates

It used to be against the law to do the kind of speculation happening right now in the hedge fund market on food commodities.

But that law stood in the way of profits, so they changed it last fall.

Speculation soared.

Food prices soared.

But of course everything but speculation is the problem.

[whistle]

6. Exactly who changed those rules?