Food Speculating worsened the problem of food insecurity

Al Qarra - Food insecurity is a problem. According to the Food and Agricultural Organization there are 870 million malnourished people in the world, 98% of these live in developing countries, and 239 Million in Africa. (gfx 1) According to the United Nations, the global food crisis in 2008, where the price of staple foods increased dramatically, resulted from the following reasons, excessive price speculation from commodity futures, drought induced crop failures in major cereal and grain producing regions, and the surge in biofuel production in Europe and the United States. (Gfx out)

Food speculating, known in financial terms as agricultural futures, started as a way for sellers of food, in this case farmers, to protect themselves from a bad harvest, for example, by locking in a price to deliver a crop at a future date. But, during the last decade, big financial institutions looked for new ways to make money, and they started to hedge their bets, in an unregulated market, on food.