Behind the Food Crisis: Free Trade?

In fact, it is traders and middlemen who stand to gain most. Speculation in world commodities is driving prices upward, from global futures commodity trading to traders and hoarders in West Africa, Thailand, and the Philippines. Analysts say traders [in West Africa] are seeking to maximize profit by hoarding stocks because they know the low production will yield higher prices. Middlemen, such as the millers and packers in Thailand, and the traders in the Philippines, are also hoarding stocks for similar reasons.

The brief cites several long-term factors as causes of the food crisis: 

The removal of tariff barriers has allowed a handful of Northern countries to capture Third World markets by dumping heavily subsidized commodities while undermining local food production and destroying livelihoods of small farmers. This has resulted in developing countries changing from net exporters to large importers of food.

Among the short-term factors listed are high transportation costs, environmental  problems due to climate change, and diversion of corn from food to biofuel: 

The IMF's World Economic Outlook (WEO) 2008, released in April 2008, holds biofuels responsible for almost half the increase in the consumption of major food crops in 2006–07. The report states, “Rising biofuel production in the United States and the European Union has boosted demand for corn, rapeseed oil, and other grains and edible oils. Although biofuels still account for only 1 1/2 percent of the global liquid fuels supply, they accounted for almost half the increase in the consumption of major food crops in 2006–07, mostly because of corn-based ethanol produced in the United States. Biofuel demand has propelled the prices not only for corn, but also for other grains, meat, poultry, and dairy through cost-push and crop and demand substitution effects.”

In a story published on AlterNet (“Corporate Vultures Lurk Behind the Food Crisis ”), Mittal takes the free trade connection further. It's an interesting theory.