This comes from this morning's Independent:
The United Nations, aid agencies and the British Government have lined up to attack the world's largest commodities trading company, Glencore, after it described the current global food crisis and soaring world prices as a "good" business opportunity.
With the US experiencing a rerun of the drought "Dust Bowl" days of the 1930s and Russia suffering a similar food crisis that could see Vladimir Putin's government banning grain exports, the senior economist of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, Concepcion Calpe, told The Independent: "Private companies like Glencore are playing a game that will make them enormous profits."
Ms Calpe said leading international politicians and banks expecting Glencore to back away from trading in potential starvation and hunger in developing nations for "ethical reasons" would be disappointed.
"This won't happen," she said. "So now is the time to change the rules and regulations about how Glencore and other multinationals such as ADM and Monsanto operate. They know this and have been lobbying heavily around the world to water down and halt any reform."
Glencore's director of agriculture trading, Chris Mahoney, sparked the controversy when he said: "The environment is a good one. High prices, lots of volatility, a lot of dislocation, tightness, a lot of arbitrage opportunities.
"We will be able to provide the world with solutions... and that should also be good for Glencore."
Glencore is the unacceptable face of 21 century capitalism, but have no doubt that it is jot alone.
And have no doubt that it is not without support. This is simply economic Darwinism at work: those who cannot pay need not survive is the logic of that school of thought. Many in the UK Tory party and most in the US Republican party subscribe to it.
We're getting back to the logic of the Irish potato famine when food was plentiful and millions died because the market denied it to them. I thought that should never happen again. But I think some are more than happy for it to happen. And happen it will unless, as noted, something is done about it.
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Aren’t Glencore one of Sinbad Boris’s favourite companies?
I don’t know how people like Chris Mahoney sleep at night. But the UK government are guilty of double standards by criticising companies like Glencore on one hand but giving in to their lobbying on the other.
While I can understand why Glencore is accused of trading in human starvation, but Monsanto makes products designed to dramatically improve farmers yields, so quite the opposite.
Oh, and potentially damages the environment forever whilst doing so…..
Tom, you’ve obviously also never heard of Monsanto’s murky involvement in “suicide seeds”, also known as “terminator seeds” – seeds which produce crops with sterile seeds, so that impoverished farmers are compelled to come back each year to buy new seeds from Monsanto.
Suggest you look at http://www.ethicalinvesting.com/monsanto/terminator.shtml, and you’ll see that, far from offering salvation and rescue, Monsanto are hell-bent on stitching up the world with crooked patents for their terminator technology. This is vampire economics!
Terminator seeds were developed by the US Department of Agriculture not Monsanto and they have pledged not to use them in any food crops. But they do of course sell hybrid seeds, where to retain the hybrid characteristics the farmer needs to re buy seeds every year. But then the yield benefits significantly outweigh the cost of seeds. Without crop protection and seed technology that companies like Monsanto make, how high would crop prices be now and how many hundreds of millions of people would starve.
Tom,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/oct/19/gm-crops-insecurity-superweeds-pesticides
Doesn’t appear to be true if the linked article is correct
It is not only companies like Glencore who are making a huge profit from the starvation of people around the world, but also invest houses like Goldman Sachs who are in a large part responsible for creating the artificial surges in the price of grain and other staples that are excluding people from the market.
And let’s not forget Cargill (the largest trader in agricultural commodities) which has use of the US military satellite system to monitor the global crop situation).