[Reader-list] Jayati Ghosh: How Bank(s)ters starve the poorest people

[Patrice Riemens]

(Cf reg set-5)

Bengal famine (1943) revisited?

bwo Doors of Perception m/l  John Thackara

FOOD: HOW BANKSTERS STARVE THE POOREST PEOPLE

The most sickening of this month's reports is about food and finance. Jayati
Ghosh, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, has found
that the dramatic rise and fall of world food prices in 2007-08 was
largely a result of speculative activity in global commodity markets. At
the height of the financial boom, he reports, so-called 'index investors'
were thought to own 35 per cent of corn futures contracts, 42 per cent of
soybean contracts and 64 per cent of wheat contracts. 'Cultivators and
food consumers appear to have lost in this phase of extreme price
instability', he writes; the only gainers from this process were
'financial intermediaries who were able to profit from rapidly changing
prices'. Despite the recent fall in agricultural prices in world trade,
food prices remain high and even continue to increase for vulnerable
groups.

Yuk.

http://www.networkideas.org/working/dec2009/08_2009.pdf