Tom Levitt

31st March, 2011

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.

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From a position of relative obscurity, Barclays Capital, the investment arm of the high-street bank, has rapidly increased its involvement in commodity trading and become not only the market leader in the UK but the third biggest trader globally, behind Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

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‘Barclays are proud to be the UK’s number one food gambler,’ says WDM food campaigner Heidi Chow. ‘They are not only making large amounts of profit from pushing up food prices but they are also actively finding new ways for other financial institutions such as pension funds to further flood the food markets with speculative cash, making a serious situation even worse.’


If you stomach can stand it, read more here: http://tinyurl.com/3hk2o4m

I think speculation should be removed from teh Stock Markets all together.

Just today gasoline jumped 5 cents a liter because of what MAY happen in the Middle East..

This is complete BS, why dont they raise the prices when something happens rather than speculate and raise prices at whim

END RANT