How low can they go? Blijkbaar inhumaan laag:
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This is the story of how some of the richest people in the world - Goldman, Deutsche Bank, the traders at Merrill Lynch, and more - have caused the starvation of some of the poorest people in the world.
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It starts with an apparent mystery. At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 per cent, maize by 90 per cent, rice by 320 per cent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people - mostly children - couldn't afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in more than 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, calls it "a silent mass murder", entirely due to "man-made actions."
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Most of the explanations we were given at the time have turned out to be false. It didn't happen because supply fell: the International Grain Council says global production of wheat actually increased during that period, for example. It isn't because demand grew either: as Professor Jayati Ghosh of the Centre for Economic Studies in New Delhi has shown, demand actually fell by 3 per cent. Other factors - like the rise of biofuels, and the spike in the oil price - made a contribution, but they aren't enough on their own to explain such a violent shift.
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Until deregulation, the price for food was set by the forces of supply and demand for food itself. (This was already deeply imperfect: it left a billion people hungry.) But after deregulation, it was no longer just a market in food. It became, at the same time, a market in food contracts based on theoretical future crops - and the speculators drove the price through the roof.
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So while the supply and demand of food stayed pretty much the same, the supply and demand for derivatives based on food massively rose - which meant the all-rolled-into-one price shot up, and the starvation began.
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Hoe gerechtvaardigt is het dat pure speculatie, en speculatie alleen, ertoe geleid heeft dat prijzen voor een basisgoed als voedsel zo spectaculair stegen?
Het is dus een fabel dat vraag en aanbod de prijs van een goed bepaalt. Wordt het dan niet tijd om de invloed van speculatie aan te pakken door in dit geval de derivatives-markt aan te pakken, zodat bovenstaande voorbeeld gewoon onmogelijk wordt gemaakt? En moeten de verantwoordelijken voor de rechtbank gebracht worden zodat ze verantwoording kunnen afleggen voor hun daden?
bron: How Goldman Sachs Caused a 'Silent Mass Murder,' Gambling on Starvation in the Developing World
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/147414