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Goldman Sachs betting on Food prices | 215 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Monsanto Sees ‘Elitism’ in Social Media-Fanned Opposition
Authored by: Wol on Thursday, May 30 2013 @ 03:34 PM EDT
And we have loads of evidence - including some from a farmer reader of GL iirc -
that most "high yield" crops aren't that at all! The farmer in
question has said that his corn or whatever it was - that his family had bred
for generations, typically produced three or four times the yield of his
neighbours' bought in seed.

As for GMOs, pesticides, vaccines, I am utterly convinced that we seriously
under-report risks. With vaccines, I consider the benefits are large and the
risks small, so while I wish we were more realistic, it's still worth it.

Pesticides cause Parkinsons? Well, you could be right, although Dr Parkinson did
live in the 1700s, iirc. But Gulf War II seems to have proven that low levels of
nerve agent (and quite possibly it's the antidotes as well!) are responsible
for a LOT of neurological diseases. And there's evidence of pesticides (a lot of
which are nerve agents...) can do the same!

And if you want to look at how risks are under-reported, look at the stats that
prove Gulf War Syndrome doesn't exist. They included ALL the personnel sent to
Iraq, and made no attempt to single out either (a) soldiers in areas allegedly
contaminated with nerve agent, or (b) soldiers who had been pre-treated with
antidote. Given that most affected people blamed either the vaccine or exposure,
that's either negligent or malicious, but was used to deny soldiers compensation
for years.

As far as GMOs are concerned, I want nothing to do with them. We can produce
enough food - we waste most of it feeding livestock for meat! We grow
inappropriate crops and then wonder why we get poor yields. We see wild
landscapes as unproductive when we should harvest their bounty ... and the
population is rapidly heading for a massive fall!

And from what I can tell, there is also plenty of evidence that GMOs cause
massive environmental harm. Not least by encouraging even more use of poisons
without thinking what those poisons are going to do to us ...

Cheers,
Wol

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Goldman Sachs betting on Food prices
Authored by: SpaceLifeForm on Thursday, May 30 2013 @ 05:35 PM EDT
Link

Speculation by large investment banks is driving up food prices for the world's poorest people, tipping millions into hunger and poverty. Investment in food commodities by banks and hedge funds has risen from $65bn to $126bn (£41bn to £79bn) in the past five years, helping to push prices to 30-year highs and causing sharp price fluctuations that have little to do with the actual supply of food, says the United Nations' leading expert on food.

Hedge funds, pension funds and investment banks such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Barclays Capital now dominate the food commodities markets, dwarfing the amount traded by actual food producers and buyers. Purely financial players, for example, account for 61 per cent of investment on the wheat futures market, according to the World Development Movement report Broken Markets.

---

You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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