The global food crisis has been put down to a number of factors. These include climate change, which leads to droughts, floods and storm, and thus to crop failures, the cultivation of biofuels, which takes valuable farmland out of food production, a global population, growing too fast for agricultural production to keep up, the emerging economies China and India, whose citizens are consuming greater quantities of higher quality food, the rising price of oil, which makes it more expensive to produce and ship food products, the rise in meat consumption, which means that more grain is needed for animal feed and decades of neglecting agriculture, especially in hunger-prone regions. But Olivier de Schutter, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food says these are all minor shocks. What's really driving up the price of food, he says, are the hedge funds and market speculators.
As I point out in my column here, the banks and hedge funds have created the crisis by "going long" on food and commodities, which has in turn created an artificial demand which has pushed up the prices.
The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation's Food Index is now at record levels and Bloomberg tells us, the hedge funds are too blame. The speculators are playing with our daily bread.
Unless they're pulled into line with regulation, prices will continue to go up. It will be a disaster all over again, like 2008. Only this time, they're playing with people's hunger.
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