it’s not like it hasn’t happened before. financial speculators buy up food commodities, hoping prices will rise. if prices do rise, there is no incentive to sell. the longer demand is greater than supply, prices will rise. eventually, someone will sell, and prices will stabilize.

this, from arab news…

Food riots: Algeria may be the beginning

By GWYNNE DYER


IF all the food in the world were shared out evenly, there would be enough to go around.

That has been true for centuries now: If food was scarce, the problem was that it wasn’t in the right place, but there was no global shortage. However, that will not be true much longer.

The food riots began in Algeria more than a week ago, and they are going to spread. During the last global food shortage, in 2008, there was serious rioting in Mexico, Indonesia, and Egypt. We may expect to see that again this time, only bigger and more widespread.

Most people in these countries live in a cash economy, and a large proportion live in cities. They buy their food, they don’t grow it. That makes them very vulnerable, because they have to eat almost as much as people in rich countries do, but their incomes are much lower.

The poor, urban multitudes in these countries (including China and India) spend up to half of their entire income on food, compared to only about ten percent in the rich countries. When food prices soar, these people quickly find that they simply lack the money to go on feeding themselves and their children properly — and food prices now are at an all-time high.

and this, from media line, blames the people there for their suffering, relieving financiers of their guilt…

The deadly rioting that has gripped Algeria and Tunisia in recent days may portend unrest elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa, amid a potentially combustible combination of rising food prices and the region’s chronically high levels of unemployment, analysts say.

At least 14 Algerians were killed in a week of rioting as of Monday while in Tunisia the number of dead reached at least 14 and may be as high as 20. In Tunisia, the unrest was sparked by the suicide of a street merchant December 17 that pointed up the lack of jobs and opportunities. In Algeria the disturbances were sparked by higher prices for basic food items, including milk, oil and sugar, but analysts said joblessness was also a factor.

read the rest of the article…

there are numerous stories and blogposts lately which detail the many, many ways that fabulously wealthy corporations and their government lackeys are actually, actively promoting the deaths of human beings. so long as there are profits to made, it makes sense to financiers and their media pundits.

How to Profit From Soaring Food Demand

By CHARLES WALLACE

Anyone who has been to a supermarket lately knows that food prices are spiraling higher. In the coffee aisle, prices are up 30% in the last couple of months alone, and chocolate, beef and chicken also have grown more costly. Sugar is at a 30-year high. Wheat prices have shot up 47%, thanks to droughts in Russia and floods in Queensland, Australia. And corn keeps surging, not only because of its use as food and feed, but also because of its role as part of the burgeoning biofuels industry.

Food-price inflation doesn’t always get much attention in the U.S. because food accounts for such a small part of our overall household budgets, usually 10% to 15%. But those prices play a far bigger role elsewhere, making up as much as 90% of household spending in Africa and 30% in China and other developing countries.

The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization this week reported that world food prices have reached a record high, surpassing the food crisis of 2007. In December, the FAO’s food basket of meat, sugar, diary and cereals was up 4% from November.

But you can also find some profit in this pain: When a commodity’s price climbs, it generally signals an investment opportunity. That holds true for food as well.

see the rest of this article, from daily finance

…so, what’s wrong with wanting to make a little extra cash at the expense of starving people?

in an article published in Harper’s magazine, frederick kaufman recounts how goldman sachs caused 1 out of 6 people around the world to experience food insecurity by driving the price of basic food staples up…

“We have never seen anything like this before,” Jeff Voge, chairman of the Kansas City Board of Trade, told the Washington Post. “This isn’t just any commodity,” continued Voge. “It is food, and people need to eat.”

The global speculative frenzy sparked riots in more than thirty countries and drove the number of the

world’s “food insecure” to more than a billion. In 2008, for the first time since such statistics have been kept, the proportion of the world’s population without enough to eat ratcheted up-ward. The ranks of the hungry had increased by 250 million in a single year, the most abysmal increase in all of human history.

read the article, in pdf format

if you weren’t paying attention in those days, there were food riots all over the world. the rioting sparked revolutions which topples at least three governments.

this was originally written this from an american perspective, but it’s clear that the peole who casually toss people’s lives away don’t just hate people in one country or another, they seem to hate human beings in general.

and this post didn’t even bring up the pointless wars, the resource extraction industries, trigger-happy cops and ideologies of hate…this world isn’t going to hell, it’s become hell.