Potato chips or poker chips?

Remember the global food emergency in late 2006 and through 2007?  Soaring food prices, communities rioting, children suffering from malnutrition, families on the verge of starvation?  I was in Ecuador during the worst of it, and I bet you remember my musings on the topic.

Well.  A new explanation for what caused the crisis is now on the table: food speculation.

See this commentary from The Independent, "How Goldman gambled on starvation."

"So it has come to this. The world's wealthiest speculators set up a casino where the chips were the stomachs of hundreds of millions of innocent people. They gambled on increasing starvation, and won. Their Wasteland moment created a real wasteland. What does it say about our political and economic system that we can so casually inflict so much pain?"

This is the world we live in.