Category Archives: Food Speculation

Date: Wednesday September 4 Time: 8.30-9.30amLocation: Place du Luxembourg, Brussels As Members of the European Parliament return to work in Brussels next week, leading campaign organisations are highlighting critical food-related issues with two stunts outside the European Parliament. The upcoming decisions taken by the European Union on biofuels and food speculation will have consequences for […]

Chris Newland, Financial Times, 17-2-2013: BNP Paribas made a loud contribution to the debate on how comfortable fund managers, and financial institutions generally, should be about speculating on food prices last week. On the back of criticism from Oxfam, the international aid agency, which accused the French house of “speculating on hunger”, BNP suspended subscriptions […]

ON NOVEMBER 29TH, a delegation of Caritas Austria, Eca Watch Austria, Attac and Forum Fairer Handel handed over their petition to stop food speculation to finance minister Maria Fekter. They managed to gather 15.737 signatures!

The World Development Movement launched Barclays Speculate, an exciting video featuring the stars of The revolution will be televised, Jolyon Rubinstein and Heydon Prowse.

This time their target is British high street bank Barclays as they hit the streets trying to sell unsuspecting members of the public investment opportunities in food speculation with “profit margins so ridiculous, it’s almost criminal”.

Campaigners will use hundreds of pots and pans to spell out ‘Stop food speculation’ in giant letters on the Place de Luxembourg in Brussels on Wednesday 26 September. The 925 pots and pans used will represent the 925 million people facing hunger worldwide. The protest comes on the day of a key vote by MEPs […]

This is a short animation to explain the link
between agricultural commodity derivatives speculation and the rise of prices (energy, food, etc).

For a fuller analysis, see Finance Watch’s recent position paper on MiFID II, “Investing not betting”.

Markus Ferber, the MEP leading the European Parliament’s work on financial markets reform has today published proposals which would go some way to putting the hunger of people before the hunger of financial institutions. The proposals come in the form of a draft report on the European Commission’s proposed changes to the ‘Markets in Financial […]

World Development Movement, 23 April 2012 Ahead of deliberations by MEPs on Wednesday, 25 campaign groups from across Europe today released a statement (PDF) urging the EU to use the review of its Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) to curb financial speculation on food prices. The European Parliament’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee (ECON) will meet […]