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> If everybody bought just the grain they needed to eat, and every grain producer simply put their product on the market for people to buy, without a "liquid global market" and price index, without traders in the middle wanting to profit from it, my food would be affordable

This is false.

Commodities futures markets exist precisely so the price of bread stays stable and relatively risk-free for a year at a time. The big players are not traders - they are companies that work in grain, use grain, produce grain, etc.

As for markets creating money by driving up prices - this doesn't really happen. You can make money when prices go up or down, and nobody really has the size or the stomach to try and corner a market (which is also illegal). Typically these efforts fail miserably and lose the trader a lot of money.

Countries manipulating prices is a totally different matter, than "markets".

I'd think hard about it before you attack commodities markets as the enemy of food prices, and do a bit of digging as to the actual purpose of those markets.

Go ahead - sell a couple hundred thousand pounds of grain. "Simply" put it on the market... how do you do that reliably? How can you plan as a farmer ? Budget for seed, etc?




I think commodities futures markets exist so that the normal commodities markets don't screw everybody over too much.

You're totally right about there being a few big players in production and so on. That's part of the problem. Because every farmer has had to operate and compete in this insane globally connected commodities market, what we're left with now after decades is a few big players. That's what you get when a German farmer has to compete with the US farmer, the Chinese farmer, and the Russian farmer, all the others and vice versa. Everybody loses and gets bought up by the bigger fish. That's a symptom of this market though, not a cause. And in my eyes, it's not a very good symptom either.

> Go ahead - sell a couple hundred thousand pounds of grain. "Simply" put it on the market... how do you do that reliably? How can you plan as a farmer ? Budget for seed, etc?

Well, I wouldn't know how of course, but that's not the point. Humanity has done the grain thing successfully, on large scales and over long time periods, multiple times in the past. Without a commodities futures market to keep prices stable.

I'm just saying this isn't the only way to do trade, and in a lot of ways, it's a very bad way to do trade.


> Because every farmer has had to operate and compete in this insane globally connected commodities market, what we're left with now after decades is a few big players. That's what you get when a German farmer has to compete with the US farmer, the Chinese farmer, and the Russian farmer, all the others and vice versa.

I must confess to some confusion. I thought you wanted affordable food. Do you think that you'd get affordable food if you were only ever able to purchase from the providers in your immediate vicinity, who won't face price competition from farmers elsewhere who might be more efficient?


“Done the grain thing successfully” seems like an odd statement. I don’t know how successful we were at a secure supply chain for grain before national markets were established, but then again we also didn’t have the technology to enable anything but more local markets until the railroad crossed America.

As for competition internationally and “big fish” - I’d say that some of this is due to economies of scale in agriculture especially as automation reduces labor required per acre - but this is also other asymmetries and market factors. State subsidies is one huge factor that incentivizes owning land that doesn’t even produce. Further, as farmers retire their kids want less and less to do with ag and sell the land to bigger companies (or maybe to a housing developer).

I’m not saying “the market” is perfect but it didn’t necessarily get this way by accident either. It serves an important function across the board for all parties involved - including consumers.




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