News
09.07.2012
FAO holds expert meeting on food price volatility
The world is being urged to study how financial market speculation could have an impact on the price of food. That is the message coming out of a high-level debate on food price volatility held on last week Friday at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome. FAO said excessive food price swings over the past five years have negatively affected poor consumers and producers around the world.
Dominican Republic President Leonel Fernández Reyna, who delivered the keynote address, said the result has been «a tremendous human impact.» He warned against using food commodities as financial instruments. «Financial speculation is exacerbating market fluctuations and this exacerbation is generating uncertainty.
This uncontrolled, unregulated exacerbation is provoking a dramatic impact on countries that are net food importers. We are not talking about an abstract concept here. We are talking about something that is having a devastating, dramatic and brutal impact on the lives of people.»
