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Nickelless
Administrator
USA
5580 Posts |
 Posted - 04/11/2008 : 03:49:40
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Just saw this on Yahoo News:
quote:
BRASILIA (Reuters) - Global investment funds and the weak dollar are largely to blame for high world food prices, a senior official of the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization said on Thursday.
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"The crisis is a speculative attack and it will last," said Jose Graziano, the UN food and farm organization's regional representative for Latin America and the Caribbean.
"This is not a conspiracy theory," he said.
Across the globe foods from bread to milk have become more expensive and in some countries helped fuel inflation. High prices for rice, beans and other food staples provoked food riots in Haiti this week.
"The lack of confidence in the (U.S.) dollar has led investment funds to look for higher returns in commodities ... first metals and then foods," Graziano told a news conference in the capital.
Investors have speculated in commodities including wheat, corn and rice because stocks in recent years have been drawn down by rising demand in emerging markets and supply shortages due to adverse climate in key producer nations, Graziano said.
"Speculative attacks become possible when you have low reserves," Graziano said.
Stocks of some food crops have fallen to their lowest levels in three decades, according to Brazilian farm experts.
Brasilia will host an FAO conference next week, which will focus on food shortages in Haiti, biofuels and small farms.
The FAO will in next week's meeting propose initiatives to help combat the current global food shortage, including incentives for small farmers.
Brazil is one of the world's leading food exporters.
(Reporting by Raymond Colitt, editing by Todd Eastham)
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swusc
Penny Hoarding Member
USA
553 Posts |
Posted - 04/11/2008 : 08:24:48
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quote:
Originally posted by Nickelless
Just saw this on Yahoo News:
quote:
BRASILIA (Reuters) - Global investment funds and the weak dollar are largely to blame for high world food prices, a senior official of the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization said on Thursday.
ADVERTISEMENT
"The crisis is a speculative attack and it will last," said Jose Graziano, the UN food and farm organization's regional representative for Latin America and the Caribbean.
"This is not a conspiracy theory," he said.
Across the globe foods from bread to milk have become more expensive and in some countries helped fuel inflation. High prices for rice, beans and other food staples provoked food riots in Haiti this week.
"The lack of confidence in the (U.S.) dollar has led investment funds to look for higher returns in commodities ... first metals and then foods," Graziano told a news conference in the capital.
Investors have speculated in commodities including wheat, corn and rice because stocks in recent years have been drawn down by rising demand in emerging markets and supply shortages due to adverse climate in key producer nations, Graziano said.
"Speculative attacks become possible when you have low reserves," Graziano said.
Stocks of some food crops have fallen to their lowest levels in three decades, according to Brazilian farm experts.
Brasilia will host an FAO conference next week, which will focus on food shortages in Haiti, biofuels and small farms.
The FAO will in next week's meeting propose initiatives to help combat the current global food shortage, including incentives for small farmers.
Brazil is one of the world's leading food exporters.
(Reporting by Raymond Colitt, editing by Todd Eastham)
Stop using food for fuel and price of food will drop. Gas might go up, but then people using gas are paying for it. Most people buy food. (some have the government buy it for them)
I use both, but someone that doesn't have a car shouldn't be paying for someone else that does.
SWUSC |
`Everybody is ignorant. Only on different subjects.' Will Rogers
"This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the "hidden" confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard." Alan Greenspan, 1966. |
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Cerulean
Penny Hoarding Member
USA
993 Posts |
Posted - 04/11/2008 : 13:19:07
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Demand outstrips supply. Simple problem. A weak currency is relatively moot in comparison.
Anybody have data to compare grains for biofuels vs. increased demand from China/India? Is the spike in demand coming from biofuels or from "developing markets"? |
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pencilvanian
1000+ Penny Miser Member
USA
2209 Posts |
Posted - 04/11/2008 : 18:16:45
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Found on The Daily Reckoning-
....farm problems are not limited to the pampas. Thanks to globalization, they're sprouting everywhere.
"Fears grow over rice crisis," is the front-page story at the Financial Times.
"Silent famine sweeps the globe," reports WorldNet Daily.
Thirty-three nations face "unrest" because of food shortages, says the IMF.
All over the world, food fights are breaking out.
Not because there is too much food or too little,
but because it has gone way up in price.
Of course, you could put that another way:
the paper money in which food is priced is going down faster than usual.
There's no less food than there was five years ago.
But there is a lot more paper money.
Modern central banking was invented so that we should have paper money - and have it in abundance.
Now, we have so much that it is causing food prices to soar.
But food is hardly in a class by itself. When one bubble pops, the authorities immediately begin pumping up another one. After the dot.com bubble deflated in 2000-2001, for example, up came even bigger bubbles in residential housing and the financial industry. Now, both housing and finance are losing air. But the central banks are still pumping hard. Where's the air going? Apparently into commodities. In other words, worldwide inflation of food prices is a monetary phenomenon, as Milton Friedman might put it, not an agricultural phenomenon.
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U.N.: Markets are to blame for world food crisis
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