GrantLawrence | Food prices are rising again.Food prices have soared in the past year, sparking fears that Britain’s most vulnerable families face a hard winter....(source)They are rising throughout the world.
In fact there were food riots recently in Mozambique that resulted in the killing of 13 people. You might think that it is just the law of supply and demand at work in the world market. If there is too much food, the prices drop and the people can eat. When there is not enough food, the prices rise and people go hungry.
This sounds pretty reasonable except that it is nonsense.
The exorbitant prices for food, just like the exorbitant prices for gasoline, are pushed not by market forces of supply and demand but by speculation.
Author and activist Raj Patel addressed this issue recently on Democracy Now.
"...And again, this is—there’s nothing natural about these speculative bubbles. They’re very much human-generated, particularly since legislation in 1991 was waived as the result of lobbying by Goldman Sachs. You’ll see increasing levels of speculation in food and fuel, that creates these bubbles in prices. And a few people profit a great deal. In 2006, for example, Merrill Lynch estimated that speculation was causing commodity prices to rise 50 percent higher than if they were based on just supply and demand alone. So there’s a lot of money in these markets...."(source)There are an estimated 1 billion people that are starving throughout the world. Food prices make the difference between life and death for those billion people. But there are just a very few elite that will make hundreds of billions of dollars in bankster bets on food. When they win the people starve. If the super financial elite lose big in their bets, the governments of the world bail them out.
If you really think about it, it is abhorrent. But this is the way an abhorrent system works.
