Rice Hoarding, Anyone?

First an announcement, Diane is back. Everyone must tell her I did a rotten job, you beg her never to go away again, it's insupportable here.

Now, speaking of insupportable. Luckily, I'm not all that fond of rice, so won't be among the multitudes rushing out to get big supplies of it from the wholesaler.

There is a business that is growing from the food scarcity/expensiveness episode. It's your agribusiness, that pays the farmer as little as possible and charges you as much as possible. In case you like cereal, you may have noticed its price is off the chart. The milk you used to put in it is worse.

Giant agribusinesses are enjoying soaring earnings and profits out of the world food crisis which is driving millions of people towards starvation, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. And speculation is helping to drive the prices of basic foodstuffs out of the reach of the hungry.

The prices of wheat, corn and rice have soared over the past year driving the world's poor – who already spend about 80 per cent of their income on food – into hunger and destitution.

The World Bank says that 100 million more people are facing severe hunger. Yet some of the world's richest food companies are making record profits. Monsanto last month reported that its net income for the three months up to the end of February this year had more than doubled over the same period in 2007, from $543m (£275m) to $1.12bn. Its profits increased from $1.44bn to $2.22bn.
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he Food and Agriculture Organisation reports that 37 developing countries are in urgent need of food. And food riots are breaking out across the globe from Bangladesh to Burkina Faso, from China to Cameroon, and from Uzbekistan to the United Arab Emirates.

Benedict Southworth, director of the World Development Movement, called the escalating earnings and profits "immoral" late last week. He said that the benefits of the food price increases were being kept by the big companies, and were not finding their way down to farmers in the developing world.

The soaring prices of food and fertilisers mainly come from increased demand. This has partly been caused by the boom in biofuels, which require vast amounts of grain, but even more by increasing appetites for meat, especially in India and China; producing 1lb of beef in a feedlot, for example, takes 7lbs of grain.

World food stocks at record lows, export bans and a drought in Australia have contributed to the crisis, but experts are also fingering food speculation. Professor Bob Watson – chief scientist at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, who led the giant International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development – last week identified it as a factor.

That's taking food off your table and laughing all the way to the bank.

As my earlier post indicated, the starvation of an entire world may just become enough impetus for a closer look at that investor arrangement that without a qualm will instrument wholesale starvation, and deprivation in the areas of fuel. Before that housing was driven out of control by investment packages that passed off any responsibility to unwise buyers at either end of the transactiion, making lending just a scam for the buyer, and buying a secured investment package a surprise 'pig in a poke' for the investors. Those pigs in pokes are still in the poke, it's not until time to pull it out and sell it that the investors will find out how much or how little it's worth.

It's another fad, like beany babies, gone berserk. Responsibility has been thrown off course, and this is destroying itself along with the poor, and the investors themselves.