What can a humble loaf of bread tell us about the world?By looking at bread, particularly the price of bread, the writer does an excellent job of weaving together many current urgent issues--capitalism, speculation, climate change, revolution.
I'd like to expand a bit on the capitalist phenomenon of speculation. One of the necessary conditions is a distorted distribution of wealth. The system of capitalism provides this by favoring a class of "owners" in such a way as to increase their "ownership" of the wealth produced by workers. Such a system ultimately ends with a highly skewed distribution of wealth. See this, this, and this.
When commodities such as food and other items are likely to become scarce, members of the owning class use their hordes of cash to invest in futures contracts. Such contracts were originally designed to protect farmers and related processors from wild price fluctuations. But capitalists soon discovered that they could profit from investing in such contracts when they perceived that certain items were likely in the future to be in short supply. They tend to bid up these contracts which results in higher commodity prices at the retail level causing severe hardships for ordinary people.
Of course, such speculative investing could be easily controlled, but this ownership class through their wealth and power long ago became the ruling class, and they make the laws.
