Food and Finance

This short video visualizes the destabilizing effects financial markets can have on food prices, based on a paper by Jayati Ghosh. It introduces and explains the idea of future contracts and how those are used to speculate with basic food stuffs. After establishing the concepts, the video sketches out how the increase in those practices resulted in a substantial rise and later collapse of food prices around 2008 with severe consequences for many developing countries and their people.

Comment from our editors:

The video is a great summary of Ghosh's paper and the producer uses creative visualisation techniques to break down the speculative use of future contracts in agriculture.

The work of this young youtube-channel is already impressive and having a look at the other videos is definitely worthwhile. 

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