Balance of payments stability is of paramount importance for developing countries, both to secure the value of their domestic currencies as well as reliable foreign currency inflows. But how is that stability ensured and how important is the growth of exports for stability?

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.