But How Much Will This Corn Cost 10 Years From Now?

So Elizabeth Palmberg wrote an interesting article about food speculation and global hunger. So thats what I'm going to talk about. To be clear we are not going to talk about our incredible harmful industrial farming tactics. That is conversation for later. To me, her article is a great example of a non-controversial chance to restore justice. Stock Brokers are trying to make money off the future price of basic commodity foods like corn, wheat, and rice. They are dumping money into the future of some foods while pulling money from others. With no limits these investors are bouncing the prices of these basic foods up and down. This greatly affects the current supply in demand. To maximize profits investors are pooling together to skyrocket prices of some foods while bottoming out others. This is crushing farmers and the food economy around the world. Without anything close to a stable price for these foods, farmers are forced to either try to hold out until they can get a fair price for their food or go all in on a good price. This hugely affects the supply and demand of these products. The food riots last year happened not because we temporarily ran out of food, it happened because investors tipped the scales to much and everything collapsed.

I agree with Elizabeth that we need some regulation so that food prices can stabilize and there wouldn't be a run on certain crops. This will create a more accurate picture of what crop prices are at.

By fixing this one regulation (which the Dodd regulation bill has the potential to do), food prices will not be ridiculously inflated and can hopefully arrive at a point where it accurately reflects the prices of the commodities not just magical speculative cost created by investors making money off the future price of food.