I am forever pleading with people to ‘wake up’ and smell the coffee; the world’s governments and major corporations are out to screw you! It came as no surprise, therefore, that in a leaked US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks we discovered that during a January 2008 meeting US and Spain trade officials strategized how to increase acceptance of genetically modified foods in Europe, including inflating food prices on the commodities market.
During the meeting, Secretary of State for International Trade, Pedro Mejia, and Secretary General Alfredo Bonet noted that “commodity price hikes might spur greater liberalization on biotech imports.”
It seems Wall Street traders got the word. By June 2008, food prices had spiked so severely that The Economist announced that ‘the real price of food had reached its highest level since 1845’.This unparalleled high in food prices in 2008 caused an additional 250 million people to go hungry, pushing the global number to over a billion. 2008 was also the first year since such statistics have been kept’ that the percentage of the world’s population without enough to eat ratcheted upward.
All to boost acceptance of GM foods, and done via a trading scheme on which Wall Street speculators profited enormously.
Even though it is now generally accepted that Wall Street speculation caused the food bubble, starving hundreds of millions, regulators have so far failed to rein in the practices that allow international bankers to manipulate food prices.
In the meantime, the biotech industry continues to repeat its mantra that GM food can cure world hunger. This claim is not backed by the science and it seems to hold less sway in the GM food debate, particularly with the Pope recognizing what many others assert: There is no shortage of food; hunger expanded because of price hikes.
Rod Millington
Chief Editor
