23.4.08

Speculating with people's essentials

Incredible, this is happening in the US: Shops ration sales of rice as US buyers panic.

They speculated with poor people's houses and gave us the subprime crisis. Now they are speculating with what we eat.

And here is a link to a story from NPR sent by a reader:
Sam's club, Costco curbing rice sales (Thanks K. Peterson)
The NPR story explains why Sam's club and Costco are rationing. It is not because of a shortage of rice in the US. Actually the US produces twice more than its population needs. Ouf! I worried for a while because I really like California's rice. But with rice prices rising, Sam's club and Costco have two choices, follow the rising prices or resort to rationing. As these two stores are not supermarkets but make their money mainly from memberships, they could not incur the anger of their members by adopting high prices, so the only option left is rationing.

But still, this means that they are actually refusing to make quick profit and keep the prices low for their customers. Is it any different from what we have in Cuba where government subsidised food is rationed ? Here the rice is subsidised by Sam's club abd Costco.

This begs a question about capitalism which is the only unchallenged economic framework in the world now:

Is Capitalism reversing itself and adapting locally and temporarily in a context of rarity and crisis in developped countries in order not to eat itself inside out ? Because if Capitalism does not adapt to the current crisis, it may as well implode. But how can it implode now while there are still so many promises and money and speculation to be done in countries who are just starting to taste it ? So better adapt.

Again thanks K. for the NPR story, it made me correct my comment. It is no yet the moment for Capitalism to die, thanks to India and China...

1 comment:

Sophia said...

This is a comment from a reader who wasn't able to post his comment directly due to blog's settings.

Hi Sophia,

I read your blog occasionally and saw your post about
the rice shortage in the US, but actually, it's less
to do with the decline of capitalism and more about
making MORE money (even more sad perhaps): check out
this story that is running on probably the best news
source in the US, National Public Radio

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89886019

You can listen to the full story about the rice
"shortage": it's more complicated than the news feed
makes it appear. I tried to post this but there are
restrictions on your site. You may like to post the
NPR link yourself.

Keep writing. Thanks, K Peterson

 
Since March 29th 2006