The Disconnect: American Mortgage Crisis v. World Food Crisis

[alcibiades_mystery]

Over the past two weeks, the news on NPR about the developing and intensifying world food crisis has risen to a fever pitch. All sorts of experts have come on speaking about the severity of the crisis, and its potential for utterly devastating social and human consequences. Major rice exporters have simply banned the exportation of rice in order to keep a reserve for their own people. Major rice importers are desperately pressing the market for more. Rice is a staple and often sole food source for 1 billion people, at least. Grain and corn, meanwhile, are skyrocketing in cost, adding additional pressure to global food supplies. Repeat: the global food supplies. Some of this price pressure, apparently, results from the American insistence on using corn for the production of ethanol (and placing high tariffs on the more efficient Brazilian sugar cane ethanol), a phenomenon largely dictated by US agri-business' corn monoculture.

Meanwhile, during the same time period, we've heard lots of additional droll commentary about the (largely) American mortgage crisis. People are losing their homes, or abandoning them, leading packaged debt securities that rely on those mortgages to fail.

There can be little doubt, in our "connected" world, that these two phenomena are related in some way. But I'm more struck by the utter disconnect between a home and a meal. The world food crisis seems very real, but it also seems like a market effect. It's shocking. It can throw the world system into chaos just as surely as the financial crisis. But the real distinction still seems to be between the materiality of the food crisis and the utter immateriality of the credit/mortgage crisis. "All that's solid melts into air," Marx said of capital, but - of course - you can't eat air.

Interesting times?

[SpiralHawk]

1. The connection: republicon-style DEREGULATION

The repub-mindset pulls off all government controls, and lets the so-called free-market go ape-shit. Conseqeunce of this republicon failure: housing crisis, banking crisis, food crisis.

Thanks a pantload, you so-called 'conservatives,' who are in reality RADICAL GLUTTONS.

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FROM FOOD FIRST
"Pundits have spent a fair amount of air time describing the deregulated financial markets that sparked the mortgage crisis. But the regulatory state of global agricultural markets is something most policymakers, let alone..."

"Thanks to non-existent anti-trust enforcement and rampant vertical integration, we’ve reached a level of concentration in our global agriculture system that would make Standard Oil blush. Three companies—Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, and Bunge—control the vast majority of global grain trading, while Monsanto controls more than one-fifth of the global market in seeds."

http://www.foodfirst.org/en/node/2099

[iamthebandfanman]

2. ive also been listening to the reports on npr

and was finding it very strange that i dont hear about it on ANY tv media outlets.

[Rosemary2205]

6. ABC covered this last night.

I was quite surprised to hear "flag pin" Charlie tell us the world food prices are skyrocketing because of speculators driving the price up. It was surreal.

[The2ndWheel]

3. Interesting? Nah, as boring as ever

A world made by cheap, concentrated, non-human energy rolling along without cheap, concentrated, non-human energy? What would be interesting about that?

We're always living in interesting times. We're always trying to keep ahead of what we're running from.

[El Pinko]

4. They are most certainly connected. Foreign investors who once bought the securities...

...that created the crazy HELOCs, subprime and liar loans that drove our speculative housing bubble have come to the realization that profligate Americans' foolish spending is not the wisest place to invest their money, which leaves COMMODITIES - oil, minerals and FOOD.

[Rosemary2205]

5. Same bunch of predators - of course it's connected.

These vultures move from one venue to the next looking for any way they can push the system right to the edge of the law (and often over) for a fast buck. The rest of the world be damned. They do not fucking care if whole neighborhoods are blighted when the mortgages hit the fan, or children and old women all over the world starve to death because basic food commodities were bid up by speculators to such a high price.

I think it's the same group of people, moving from one thing to the next, picking it's bones clean and then moving on. I don't think it's only Americans. I think there are a band of folks spread out around the world - and I really wish we could figure out a way to just remove them from the planet.