Hightower Lowdown

Hedge-fund schemers and Wall Street manipulators--the very characters who brought us the Great American Housing Collapse--have a new target for their fast-buck profiteering: farming. EIEIO!

Speculators have long messed with farmers by artificially manipulating prices on everything from corn to soybeans. But now they're pooling up billions of dollars from global investors to go after the farms themselves, as well as fertilizer plants, grain elevators, ships and barges, and other basic tools for producing, transporting, and storing our food supply. As one hedge-fund operator says, "It's going on big time. There is considerable interest in what we call 'owning structure.'"

By "owning structure," these buyers mean centralizing control of food in the hands of financial manipulators who have only one crop in mind: fat profits. These multibillion-dollar funds are buying thousands of farms in the U.S., Britain, Brazil, and elsewhere, including Africa, and turning farmers into corporate laborers.

The funds aim to lock down production and stockpile the supply so that they can control price. If corn prices don't hit investors' target numbers, simply store the corn and force prices up. Or, if corn prices are down in the U.S., ship it to Japan or wherever else might be more profitable. And if these distortions cause a food crash? Hey, the speculators will already have sucked out billions in profits, and they will just move on to the next hot investment.

Hedge funds bring nothing but greed and grief to the farm economy and our food supply, and they should be banned from "owning structure."