Betting on Hunger: Is Financial Speculation to Blame for High Food Prices?

Ethical MarketsReforming Global Finance

We at Ethical Markets agreed with this  analysis by Prof Bar-Yam and his team at NECSI and we are fortunate that Dr. Bar-Yam is a member of our
Advisory Board, Hazel Henderson, Editor

Remember the food crisis of 2007 and 2008, when rapid and extreme increases in global food prices led to riots and civil unrest in 28 countries? While we have yet to see unrest on the same level since, the shadow of that crisis, and the debate as to what the systemic causes were, remains. At the end of November, the World Bank warned in its Food Price Watch report that high and volatile prices are the “new normal.” In a world where nearly 1 billion people live in hunger — an estimate that Jomo Sundaram, assistant director general of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), describes as conservative — high food prices can be fatal.