Huge investment funds have already poured hundreds of billions of dollars into booming financial markets for commodities like wheat, corn and soybeans.
But a few big private investors are starting to make bolder and longer-term bets that the world's need for food will greatly increase -- by buying farmland, fertilizer, grain elevators and shipping equipment.
Want to reply to a comment? Hint: Click "Reply" at the bottom of the comment; after being approved your comment will appear directly underneath the comment you replied to
Where I live we have local CSA (community sponsored agriculture) alternatives. All foods
must come from a 150 to 200 mile radius. After having read Fast Food Nation I
would search out these alternatives if you are able.
Alternet.org has good articles on the perils of the evolving food crisis
And by the way - fuck Monsanto
Let's hope these people are going to organic farming which builds healthy SOIL .
Soil that has living organic life in it, bugs, worms, especially worms. Healthy soil has a high concentration of worm activity there and that is why is healthy. Of course in order not kill all these life giving organizims you don't use heavy chemicals. The added benefit is you don't need to fertilize as much, because the soil IS ALIVE.
Downside: big Pharma and chemical companies don't make as much money.......yeah. Let's cut these jerks out of the equation. The are poisioning the world.
The concentration of economic power in the hands of the few is indeed breathtaking. Such power in such concentration is also, indeed, dangerous. Such concentrated economic interests will established rules, regulations and supportive knowledge, seen as "truth" that may turn mankind into the matrix of nature for untold eons as inheritance of wealth and dynastic governannce become one and the same.
Ancient Chineae dynasties, with the assistance of civil service, controlled a hapless, mentally controlled citizentry for hundreds of years while the progress of China stood still, or declined. There is little evidence to doubt the inevitable consolidation of uncontrolled world wealth towards establishing a similiar dyanastic system with the same result.
It is for certain that the continued acquisition and management of American assets by international power centers spells the end of American self governanace. The time for acting to save our Republic is now. Soon the time for acting will have passed.
In every country on every continent, every People's Revolution has been about one thing and one only--Land Redistribution. Mexico alone, has had four or five revolutions on this issue. NAFTA has caused over 1Million farmers to be thrown off their lands in Mexico, and that property has been consolidated in the names of the Oligarchy that rules there.
What has always been the greatest source of wealth and power for the Monarchies?
Land!
And with this new electronic and instantaneous ability to game the market in commodities, oil or any thing else, the new monarchists have found a way to get back their Feudal Holdings. This robbery of the American people and redistribution of wealth is leading to the very scenario this article speaks to; A landed Gentry supported by tenant farmers, at best, indentured servants at the worst.
Remember this people; A person without land is powerless. That's why it was the first thing the Founding Fathers gave to the New Americans--because there is nothing like ownership of part of your country to make you strong and proud.
That's why it will be one of the first things they take back!
Maybe tearing up all that farmland to build 5000 sq ft McMansions on 5 acre lots wasn't the best idea?
Poor ole moonbat Liberals that live in the cities. Don't you realize you are on "life support" dependent on oil to bring you everything you need? Of course you are looking at the price of gas, but the real shortage that matters is indeed food.
Do some reading..not moonabt sites like Huff&Puff, but real business sites that discuss the coming food crisis. Who do you think is going feel it the most...yep you moonbats in the cities. At best you have a potted tomato plant on a balcony.
Us poor ole dumb rednecks are stuck with huge gardens that produce all our vegetables (year round) fertilized by our local livestock that also produce our dairy products. We are just so dumb out here we just don't know any bettert....we sure do envy you city slickers.
get off your high horse, neocons are not the only one who live in the country and grow gardens with there own fertilizer.
and this is brought to you by a liberal redneck
So you think you're better than us urban dwellers because you live in the country?
I guess that would make you, oh what's the word I'm looking for?
Hmmmmmmm, somebody who thinks they're better than other people.
Wait, it'll come to me...........
Oh yeah, an ELITIST!
What's your point Buckwheat?
Enjoy your garden.
Meanwhile city "slickers" (are you 90 years old??) will do what they always do:
buy from all those big 'ole conagra conglomerates!
So enjoy Green Acres Tex!! It's all about CORPORATE agriculture! You selling?
At a time when we should be breaking up the huge, oil-driven farms, and going back to small, organic family farms, now our precious farm land will snatched up by the Agribusiness, and farm prices will skyrocket along with food prices.
We need many more small, organic farms, and the government should be supporting this. All universities should be teaching organic ag, and gradually move toward a sustainable future. Petrochemical based feritlizers and pesticides are poisoning the planet.
Are you a farmer?
This has all been done before, kids.
It was called colonialism, and it led to apartheid.
There is nothing new under the sun.
Didn't it also destroy millions of acres of arable land?
Indeed, along with the aboriginal population that once inhabitated it.
It's obvious that this has the potential to be be huge trouble for millions of people, unless safeguards are in place. The potential to profit from abuses, neglect & mismanagement is tremendous.
The question is, what's going to be done about it?
Help me get this straight -
World food prices are controlled by the same market speculation systems that control oil prices?
Just asking..
Chavez, the Corporate Oligarchs are just completing the ultimate transfer of wealth that was begun with the Great Depression. They still use the FED, Commodities Boards and International Banks to game the market and apply financial pressure. But now, instead of hoping for a friendly drought to provide the final nail in the coffin and force farmers off the land, they can, with the push of a button create "shortages" or "overages" that have the effect of a hurricane.
Who was it in the 30's who said,"Land. They ain't makin' it anymore!"
Looking at it now, that was a Revolutionary statement.
Global markets will be further complicted by rapidly rising production costs, record energy prices, fluctuating agricultural, energy and trade policies, extreme volatility in exchange rates, and the credit crisis.
Yuppers. But you knew that....
Pretty dang scary, ain't it.
Yep,... it is scary. That's why I started putting in my own "Victory Garden" this spring, and will be expanding it next spring.
This year it is only going to be tomatoes, anaheim peppers, green beans, acorn squash and faba beans,... but next year I'm getting a bit more creative,...
Unchecked Capitalism/"Free Market"/Neoliberalism has created nothing but war, despair, concentration of wealth, poverty, slavery, environmental destruction, disease, hunger...
......but hang tight America! It's only had 30 years to prove itself.
"These new bets by big investors could bolster food production at a time when the world needs more of it."
As if!
Bets implies gambling, a lack of strategy, no sense of purpose or control or overhauling the fundamental way agriculture is done. They're in it for the money to manipulate the price of commodities (biofuels) plain and simple. They don't give a rat's hooey about bolstering food production.
And watch as rural life and small towns disappear, become even more poorer, one only needs to look at Californias Imperial Valley and the SW San Joaquin Valley (Westlands Water District) to see what happens when farmlands become consolidated into the hands of a few. People are poorer, land more polluted with chemicals (think Kesterson-google it folks). lobbying more intense because corps can pay em to lobby for cheaper water from federal (and ultimately taxpayer) funded water projects. Oh and what happens when they decide they want to get outta farming, and then they sell the best land for farming to create more urban sprawl.
I assume you mean Kesterson Reservoir and not the elementary school?
Yes
Some very interesting aspects to this, some of which will be controversial.
When this kind of money is put into an industry, there are sometimes advances that otherwise would not be initiated. One that I'd like to see, and from what I've read elsewhere, an idea whose time is emerging, is verticle farming in urban settings, which require intense capitalization but offer the benefits of being very profitable as the systems become more automated...a super efficient, non-polluting, watrer conserving, self contained, self-cleaning, ten story structure, automated for planting, growing, tending and picking 10 million heads of high priced gourmet lettuce a year for a city like NYC or LA and the urban farmers market, , year after year, without having to ship it into the city and offering it fresh every day...seems like a no-brainer to me and I'd rather have that as a new urban industry than just another condo or recycling center.
There's a reason this hasn't happened yet: you're sitting on your gasket and doing nothing about it. You think the wealthy are in this for the increased food production??? To change the way farming is done in urban settings???
Subsidies for corn-alcohol don't make sense. Sell the corn to people, not to cars. Use switch grass for ethanol, as it can be grown on marginal land with fewer resources.
I met a farmer recently and he said that if we were to grow hemp - not the potent kind - in all of South Dakota we would meet our oil-energy needs with just S. Dakota.
Switchgrass is for people who don't understand the alternatives.
Industrial hemp (the non-potent kind) still grows WILD to heights of 15 feet and more in parts of Kansas, Kentucky and Missouri. Two growing seasons could replace 25 years of equivalent acreage tree growth for the paper industry.
Why doesn't our corporate-loving government allow industrial hemp cultivation?
WILD means NO pesticides, herbicides or fertilizers are needed. Figure it out...
Will the people of the US continue to provide subsidies to these wealthy investors as a guarantee that only taxpayers lose money and both investors and wealthy farmers continue to do well?
Of course "we" will.
And we'll also end up paying higher prices for our own food to boot.
Scr*wed twice, how nice.
In a candid interview via satellite from China, Olympic...
Update: Keith Olbermann had Rachel Maddow on "Countdown" Tuesday night to celebrate...
UPDATE: A day after Roseanne's blogs from below...
Loading comments…
New York Times | DIANA B. HENRIQUES | June 4, 2008 09:59 PM