World Development Movement blog

As a regular reader of this blog you know that we’ve been campaigning for regulation of speculation on food prices for the last 18 months or so. We were therefore pleased to see that the topic of this year’s Blog Action Day, on 16 October, is food. 

We are pleased to see the big NGOs increasingly getting behind our food speculation campaign. A few months ago, Christian Aid published a report linking rising food prices with speculation. Now Oxfam has joined in with a new briefing on financial speculation in agricultural markets. Not a game: speculation vs food security (PDF), comes out strongly in favour of regulation and calls for the same rules that we have been calling for since we launched the campaign last July.

It’s no secret that successive UK governments have long favoured a “light touch” approach to regulating the financial sector. And it’s pretty obvious the mess that this has left us in. But until the research published this weekend by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, most people didn’t quite realise the influence of the sector over the UK’s main governing party.

An interview with James Picardo from Jubilee Scotland on an event that puts Third World Debt on trial here in Scotland.

Jessica Radford, used to be campaigns and policy intern

Two new videos on foodspeculation have recently been produced. The first, from the Ecologist, shows the impact of rising food prices in Mexico. The second, an animation produced by our European partners, explain the technicalities of how speculation pushes up food prices.

Mr Universe himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, then Governor of California, backed Scotland’s landmark climate change act in 2009 – but, two years on, is Scotland still showing its muscle when it comes to taking action on climate change?

One of our climate campaigners, Kirsty Wright, reports back from a recent meeting of the World Bank's climate fund and outlines the next few months of campaigning in the run up to the UN climate talks in Durban.