The banks and our soaring food costs

[LadyBlaBlah]

The rises in inflation and the soaring food costs (which despite reports of 4-5% are more likely around 20% in the last few months) are NOT just to do with global demand. The banks are, yet again, up to no good making money out of speculating now on FOOD commodities

They have simply swapped the speculating they were doing on the sub-prime market, and are now using food to make their money out of nothing.

So when Bob Diamond and those of his ilk say that they deserve their bonuses and enormous profit, maybe they really really don't.

They are forcing up the price of food in their hideous pursuit of making money out of doing nothing and flattering their pathetic ego's without any regard for the people who are struggling to eat. People on here have sometimes said that there is no moral element to banking - can that really be true if they are deliberately screwing up the food commodity markets - because this does have an effect on other human being.

Rant over

some info here

Well, I suppose it's possible that there's a cunning plan to increase biofuel use to increase food security concerns in order to encourage Europe to grow transgenic crops, but I come into contact with a lot of people working in this industry, and I'm rather sceptical about it.

There are definite very serious concerns about food security at the moment, which is why a lot of funding is going into better forms of biofuels.

Environmentalists have major concerns about food security, as it looks like more land across the world may have to be put over to intensive food production, which is not particularly ecologically diverse. The talks I'm hearing are about how to balance increased food production, ecological diversity, amenity value of countryside, and fuel.

Fact is we eat too much food in the West, especially meat. Now China is eating more as it grows richer.

Even if we don't use land to grow fuel something as simple as a frozen chip uses vast amounts of energy (and water) to grow and to manufacture.

all this moving money around, does make me wonder... money is an entirely human construct, we believe, therefore it exists...

what would happen if say China refused to accept American Dollars or the democracised Middle-East started to deal only with India and Russia?

we are no longer in the driving seat of our economy and the government is taking part in trying to shield us from this fact (to maintain control)... we have rested on our laurels for so long, we don't know the value of things anymore.

as seen in the Middle-East oppression and deception can only last for so long.

petrol, clean water and food are limited resources... what are we going to do about it?