The Food Bubble: How Wall Street Starved Millions and Got Away With It

UPDATE: One of our readers was kind enough to send along a link to the full article. It's available here.

Thom shared a little of the article during his interview with Kaufman.

Hartmann: "The history of food took an ominous turn in 1991, at a time when no one was paying much attention. That was the year Goldman Sachs decided our daily bread might make an excellent investment."

And then towards the end of the story, just a couple of sentences here. "Bankers had taken control of the world's food, money chased money and a billion people went hungry." Remember the food riots of a couple of years ago around the world?

"The world wide price of food had risen by 80% between 2005 and 2008 and unlike other food catastrophes in the last half century or so, the United States was not insulated from this one." Could it be because it was our banksters that were doing it?

"As 49 million Americans found themselves unable to put a full meal on the table, one in five kids came to be dependent on food kitchens. In Los Angeles nearly a million people went hungry. In Detroit, armed guards had to watch over grocery stores." And then the question, "Could this happen again?"

Really great interview. Too bad our "mainstream media" isn't touching this one. As they noted during the interview, it looks like there's nothing that these bankers won't exploit to make a buck. Really disgusting. And all we've got going on in the United States is some half-baked sorry excuse for "reform".


Source: Video Cafe

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The REAL REASON for FOOD INFLATION: Food Bubble: Speculating in Hunger

Is The Food Bubble About to Burst?

'Another explanation for the sudden jump in grain prices is not mentioned by this Wall Street Journal writer but is suggested by other analysts. William Pfaff wrote in the April 16 International Herald Tribune:

[M]ore fundamental is the effect of speculation in food as a commodity – like oil and precious metals. It has become a haven for financial investors fleeing from paper assets tainted by subprime mortgages and other toxic credit products. The influx of buyers drives prices and makes food unaffordable for the world's poor. "Fund money flowing into agriculture has boosted prices," Standard Chartered Bank food commodities analyst Abah Ofon told the media. "It's fashionable. This is the year of agricultural commodities."⁵

The "hot money" that has fled the collapsed real estate bubble is now moving into the commodities bubble, and that includes food. "Hot money" is an influx of speculative capital in search of high rates of return, quickly moving from one market to another. It moves, however, not because the products are better (the traditional justification for price-setting according to "free market forces") but because the speculative "spread" is better.

Money is invested not in making real goods and services but simply in making more money. Food prices are being driven by speculators, and today that includes ordinary investors like you and me, who can now gamble in agricultural futures through ETFs that have opened up a lucrative market formerly available only to big investment players.'

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An Answer to the Global Food Crisis: Peasants and Small Farmers can Feed the World!

'Trade liberalization has waged a virtual war against small producers. Farmers have been forced to produce cash crops for transnational corporations (TNCs) and buy their food on the world market.

Over the last 20-30 years the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and more recently the WTO have forced countries to decrease investment in food production and to reduce support for peasant and small farmers. However, small farmers are the key food producers in the world.'

'Neo-liberal policies have destroyed the capacities of countries to feed themselves.
After 14 years of NAFTA (North America Free Trade Agreements) Mexico went through a major crisis often dubbed as the “tortilla crisis”. From an exporting country Mexico has become dependent on US maize imports and current imports 30 percent of its maize. Nowadays, while increased amounts of US maize have suddenly been diverted to agro-fuels production, quantities available for the Mexican markets have dropped, provoking price surges.'

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