By Tom Levitt
High-street customers could be subsidising the role of Barclays Capital in driving up global food prices and leaving millions facing hunger and malnutrition, says campaign group. Tom Levitt reports
Barclays could be making as much as £340 million a year in profit through gambling on the price of key commodity crops like coffee, sugar and wheat, the Ecologist has learnt.
By creating funds to allow investors to speculate on the price of food, in the same way they would invest in the shares of a company, Barclays and others are able to bet on the price of food. However, food commodity trading is leading to higher and more volatile prices, say campaigners, which affect poor families in the less industrialised world the hardest as they can’t afford basic foods and also make it more difficult for farmers to plan and invest.
A World Bank report in February showed an extra 40 million people had been pushed into poverty as a result of rising food prices since June 2010.
An analysis of Barclays’ involvement in food speculation, commissioned by the campaign group World Development Movement (WDM) – and seen by the Ecologist – has found it to be the dominant figure in the UK both in terms of the estimated volume of trading and risk it is allowing its traders to take.
Bill Bard says:
Gambling with our food now.
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