New Threat to Farmers: The Market Hedge

[depakid]

Reaping what Republicans and DINO's have sowed with 25 years of irresponsible deregulation....


Fred Grieder, a farmer near Bloomington, Ill., has more to worry about these days than hard work, crops and rain. If the market for commodities futures turns the wrong way, he could be wiped out.

"Fred Grieder has been farming for 30 years on 1,500 acres near Bloomington, in central Illinois. That has meant 30 years of long days plowing, planting, fertilizing, and hoping that nothing happens to damage his crop. But Mr. Grieder’s days on the farm in Carlock, Ill., are getting even longer. He now has to keep a closer eye on the derivatives markets in Chicago, trying to hedge his risks so that he knows how much he will be paid in the future for crops he is planting now. And the financial tools he uses to make such bets are getting more expensive and less reliable.

In what little free time he has, Mr. Grieder attends Illinois Farm Bureau meetings to join other frustrated farmers who are lobbying officials in Chicago and Washington to fix a system that was designed half a century ago to reduce uncertainty for food producers but is now increasing it.
...

Those wild swings in expected prices are damaging the mechanisms that are supposed to cushion the jolts of farming — turning already-busy farmers into reluctant day-traders and part-time lobbyists.

One measure of the farming industry’s frustration is the overflow crowd expected at a public forum on Tuesday at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in Washington. Interest is so high that the commission, for the first time ever, will provide a Webcast of the forum, which it says is being held to gather information about whether key hedging markets “are properly performing their risk management and price discovery roles.” The Webcast link is available on the commission’s Web site, www.cftc.gov.

The additional costs that stem from volatility in grain prices are not just a problem for farmers. “Eventually, those costs are going to come out of the pockets of the American consumer,” said William P. Jackson, general manager of AGRIServices, a grain-elevator complex on the Missouri River.

More: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/business/21cnd-commodity.html?hp

[DJ13]

1. We need to remove all commodities from the speculative market

Until we do we face more speculation driven inflation, and a decreasing supply to maintain artificially high prices.

[gear_head]

2. the US is not the whole world n/t