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13-Jul-10 08:17

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Another good piece by Johann Hari, but this article doesn't even mention the advent of GM foods and how they were inserted into the big picture.

I thought GM crops were what MADE the markets in the 90's? I also thought the whole point of GM foods, for which I have no doubt Goldman was a financier to Monsanto and others, was to keep food on the cheap and "feed the world"? Yeah, right. In my estimation, the whole point of GM foods, boxed or otherwise degraded, is to make people ill, but I surely didn't think they would use absolute starvation as an excuse to make billions of dollars. How did these companies think this was going to look to the general public? "We have the answer -- we'll just GM all the foods and that will solve the problem" was their chant. And we were supposed to buy that line of bull puckey. The problem here is that the majority of non-thinkers actually DID buy it, didn't care enough to pay attention, or simply didn't know of the existence of sterilized seeds and GM crops. There seems to be a whole line of *uninformation* here.

So then, are GM foods cheaper to produce for the masses or not? Corn prices shot up by 90 percent?? Why is that? All corn is now GM (and has been for quite some time) which was supposed to LOWER the price, I thought. It's that kind of round-about thinking on the part of the corporations that the general public needs to start thinking about. "Let us produce GM foods because we can produce so much more for such a small price." But then the prices soar and people starve? The very people this was supposed to "help"? I don't see how these companies can call this *logic* by any stretch of the imagination.

American farmers should be outraged at the bastardization of seed crops. But, as usual, they think the government actually cares about them because they "produce something". Ha! Wake up America.

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How Goldman gambled on starvation
July 2, 2010, The Independent (One of the UK's leading newspapers)

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-how-goldman-gambled...

This is the story of how some of the richest people in the world – Goldman, Deutsche Bank, the traders at Merrill Lynch, and more – have caused the starvation of some of the poorest people in the world.

At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 per cent, maize by 90 per cent, rice by 320 per cent.

In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people – mostly children – couldn't afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in more than 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown.

Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level.

Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, calls it "a silent mass murder", entirely due to "man-made actions."

Through the 1990s, Goldman Sachs and others lobbied hard and the regulations [controlling agricultural futures contracts] were abolished. Suddenly, these contracts were turned into "derivatives" that could be bought and sold among traders who had nothing to do with agriculture. A market in "food speculation" was born. The speculators drove the price through the roof.

Note: For an abundance of reports from major media sources detailing the many complex and hidden strategies employed by financial corporations to keep their hyper-profits flowing in, click here: http://www.wanttoknow.info/bankbailoutnewsarticles

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