Talk:World food shortage of 2008

This needs something on the role of speculators in creating famine where there is no reason of food shortage for there to be famine - David Gerard (talk) 20:54, 5 June 2010 (UTC)

Yes it does. As written the article makes it sound like there really was a sudden shortage, as opposed to a speculative bubble. The article also seems to blame biofuels for the problem, which is dubious. I'll have to go back thru my sources when I have the time to refute this, but the short version is much of the corn produced in the US is discarded anyway and ethanol merely found a good use for it. If biofuels contributed to the rise in food prices it was purely for speculative reasons, investors driving up the price on expectation that ethanol might be the next big thing. There is no world food shortage, there are wasteful interlocking systems of corporate greed on the one hand and government subsidy and overregulation on the other both keeping a truly equitable trade from emerging. Secret Squirrel (talk) 00:55, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

I've linked a Johann Hari article summarising the role of speculators. He's unashamedly partisan, but is generally good with facts.

Frankly, the rest of the article is bollocks. There was never an actual shortage of production at any point. I'm not sure what to do apart from removing it all, but would like second opinions - David Gerard (talk) 14:00, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

It's been a few years since someone last edited this Talk, but I added an article about Goldman Sachs. Anyway, I have to question the whole "Speculators at Goldman Sachs were primarily responsible for the doubling prices" shtick. If everyone eats an average of 50 cents of grain a day, the yearly grain consumption alone is something on the order of several trillion dollars. I doubt Goldman Sachs alone has the hundreds of billions of dollars necessary to upset the market for that long. The thing about artificial bubbles on plants is that they burst as soon as someone figures out how to grow more plants. Far more likely was the skyrocketing oil/gas prices, biofuels, unstable national economies, greater meat consumption, etc, which made the nominal price of basic foodstuffs rise. If it really was speculators, it was less a few rich guys going "bwuahaha I'm going to hold starving orphans hostage!" and more large numbers of people going "AMAGAD my dollars are about to be worthless, gotta put it away in something fast, but I ain't no goldbug!".CorruptUser (talk) 03:31, 29 January 2015 (UTC)