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Speculators Trying to Buy Control of Food Supply

inthesenewtimes — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 07:54:12 +0000

George Washington's blog

28th July, 2008
According to the New York Times, Financial Times, and others, hedge funds and other investors are buying up farms, farmland, fertilizer, grain elevators, shipping equipment and other necessities for producing food.

Given the meltdown in the housing and financial sectors and the weakness in the U.S. economy, large investors figure that everyone has to eat, and so investing in food production is a sure thing.

That means that speculators will drive up food prices.

As Jim Hightower puts it:

"By 'owning structure,' they mean centralizing control of food in the hands of financial manipulators who have only one crop in mind: fat profits.

***
Price? Aha! That’s what consolidation of farms and storage facilities is all about. If you can lock down production and stockpile the supply – you can control price. If corn prices are lower than what investors want them to be, simply store the corn and force prices up. Or, if corn prices are down in the U.S., ship it to Japan or wherever else might be more profitable. And if these distortments cause a food crash? Hey, the speculators will already have sucked out billions in profits, and they will just move to the next hot investment.

Hedge funds bring nothing but greed and grief to the farm economy and our food supply, and they should be banned from 'owning structure.'"

Hightower may be right: we should demand that Congress prevent speculators from buying up one of the main necessities.

Moreover, this just strengthens my conviction that we should guarantee our access to inexpensive and healthy food. See this and this.

US WATCH: AGRICULTURE DECAYS, BIOFUEL MATTERS MOST!

erleargonza — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:48:45 +0000

Erle Frayne Argonza

Agriculture remains to be among the most protected sectors of the US economy. Enough to cause ceaseless chagrin on the members of the WTO, who have been demanding that the EU-USA-Japan trilateral belt better play by the rules and remove the trade barriers in agriculture.

But the overall alarming trend in America’s agriculture is the rapid shrinking of arable lands altogether. Lucky enough that America is blessed with millions of acres of arable land, but the liberalization of land use conversions affected this mighty economy strongly like in other countries. Prime agricultural lands are being transformed into commercial and residential lands, most specially those southern regions that practically fed the whole America for nigh centuries long.

Agriculture is following a general trend of economic decay. The historic practice of mono-cropping alone had already created havoc on the soil quality in many places across the US. Compounding the decay problem is the pressure by WTO members for the sector to bring down the trade barrier, thus possibly bringing in floods of cheap food imports from Europe and the south.

Just recently, the inflated marketability of biofuels led many a planter to shift to massive corn production, for the sole purpose of raking profits on alternative fuels. Of course, many hedge funds and enthused investors had cashed in on the biofuels craze, and news came out that even Bill Gates had invested in this ‘greenfield’ energy source.

Estimates put the amount of corn planted to biofuels as more than enough to feed over 110 million people. That’s a lot of mouths to feed for sure! But feeding mouths is hardly the priority in the US agriculture today, the core focus being the next round of looting on the consumers’ purse by driving food prices upwards both due to the biofuels craze and speculation on food stocks.

So, what say you, voters of America? Let’s just hope the political bigwigs contesting the presidency will indeed take the interest of ‘food security’ at its core. Failing to do so, America itself might end up with inflated food prices in the couples of years ahead, and believe it or not, the Depression era of seeing people without food on their plates may come back. The difference being that the Great Depression was only quite temporary, while this coming ‘food insecurity’ will be around for a very long time.

This brings to mind what the late John Meynard Keynes declared cryptically, “in the long run, we shall all be dead!”

[Writ 06 June 2008, Quezon City, MeroManila]

Woe to you who add house to house

sholander — Thu, 29 May 2008 20:17:58 +0000

I’m a little puzzled. I’ve been reading along in the Bible, particularly the prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures. I ran across a verse that is particularly troubling:

Woe to you who add house to house
and join field to field
till no space is left
and you live alone in the land.

Isaiah 5:8

I live on Saint Simons Island, a resort community and retirement center for the southeast. The island is speckled with large homes. I’m a great fan of architecture and I personally like large homes – the larger the canvas, the more an artist can say. Close to the beach, many of the homes express the character of their builder or owner very well – Tuscan villa, Charlestonian ante-bellum, Colonial, Caribbean bungalow.

Also, on this island, home owners are increasingly selling and demolishing their one large home to create two smaller homes, for renting or simply to increase their overall resale value. It’s pretty common, especially toward the beach, to see towering skeletons of homes where one older home used to be.

Is this what Isaiah is talking about, adding house to house and field to field? Are we like those for whom Isaiah issued this warning? Or is something else going on here?

Jeremiah, another ancient Hebrew prophet and poet, issues a warning similar in metaphor to Isaiah’s:

Woe to him who builds his palace by unrighteousness, …

He says, 'I will build myself a great palace
with spacious upper rooms.' …
Does it make you a king
to have more and more cedar?
Did not your father have food and drink?...
He defended the cause of the poor and needy,
and so all went well.
Is that not what it means to know me (YHWH)?...

But your eyes and your heart
are set only on dishonest gain,
on shedding innocent blood
and on oppression and extortion.

Jeremiah 22:13-17

Maybe what’s going on here is an abuse of power and wealth. Maybe what Isaiah and Jeremiah are both warning is the misuse of God’s creation to maintain a status quo – keeping the rich wealthy and the poor impoverished.

And maybe we still need to hear these warnings:

Woe to you who speculate on food prices,
artificially driving up the price of God’s abundant blessing,
till those who are starving are rioting in the streets.
Woe to you who trade oil futures,
increasing your profit margins
while the orphans and widows shiver in the cold.
Woe to you who red line your neighborhoods,
till no one can afford to live in a beautiful area of the country
and you live alone on a beach.

Food in the news

sarai. — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:28:50 +0000

Nova Scotians have a hard time affording healthy foods. 120 000 people missing out is a lot, in a province of under a million. For myself, I do all right. I spend probably close to $150 per month. I do eat meat, I do make a habit of choosing unprocessed and inexpensive things, but I don't scrimp. I'm uncomfortably aware that even my graduate student stipend leaves me with more grocery money than many have.

I ran out of flour on Sunday. I need to buy milk too. 10kg of flour and 2L of milk will cost me almost twenty dollars. Last year, I would have paid half that. The last bag of flour I bought, last summer, cost me six bucks, because it was on sale, down from $8. Milk has gone up too.

Accessibility to grocery stores is another underreported issue. What do you do when you have no car, limited mobility, and the sidewalks outside are covered in ice and snow? Don't forget that bus fare adds the price of a loaf of bread, or five or ten pounds of potatoes, to the cost of groceries. And, not all transit is accessible, either. I'm not advocating slapping a new grocery store down on every other block, but it's worth pointing out that the cost of travel or convenience is another barrier to affording groceries. It's hard to buy in bulk when you can't haul it home.

Globally, the food crisis is so much worse my mind just overloads and shuts down. I have a hard enough time grasping 120 000 - and most of those 120 000 aren't actually going hungry. The latest statistic, 100 million people who are hungry now (but weren't six months ago), is just incomprehensible. How about this? "It's going to take human life."

I honestly don't know what to do.