Quote Originally Posted by Watcher In The Middle View Post

....The whole UN "Oil For Food" program fiasco will immediately reappear in all it's full blown glory, and there isn't a US pol out there ready to grab for that one again....

The other part of the problem is that honestly, both China and OPEC have had more of an negative influence on the overall psyche of the Commodities Marketplace than most people realize. It's an attitude like "So rice is a grand a ton. Oil's $120 a Bbl. You want Cheap rice? Then cheap rice = cheap oil. Otherwise ante up & pay the price".

And China comes across as willing to do business with virtually anybody. And it's been coming across to the general public as paying off for them. Now, if you look closely, it's not necessarily true, because China has quite a number of very serious issues. But the Marketplace is becoming increasingly desensitized to these issues in the developing nations. It's becoming a very harsh environment out there.
Watcher in the Middle,

Appreciate the links. No, I would agree that government intervention/price controls are not the answer, Argentina provides a fairly recent Latin American example of why.

This week's Economist offers an interesting analysis and solution

In general, governments ought to liberalise markets, not intervene in them further. Food is riddled with state intervention at every turn, from subsidies to millers for cheap bread to bribes for farmers to leave land fallow. The upshot of such quotas, subsidies and controls is to dump all the imbalances that in another business might be smoothed out through small adjustments onto the one unregulated part of the food chain: the international market.

For decades, this produced low world prices and disincentives to poor farmers. Now, the opposite is happening. As a result of yet another government distortion—this time subsidies to biofuels in the rich world—prices have gone through the roof. Governments have further exaggerated the problem by imposing export quotas and trade restrictions, raising prices again. In the past, the main argument for liberalising farming was that it would raise food prices and boost returns to farmers. Now that prices have massively overshot, the argument stands for the opposite reason: liberalisation would reduce prices, while leaving farmers with a decent living.

There is an occasional exception to the rule that governments should keep out of agriculture. They can provide basic technology: executing capital-intensive irrigation projects too large for poor individual farmers to undertake, or paying for basic science that helps produce higher-yielding seeds. But be careful. Too often—as in Europe, where superstitious distrust of genetic modification is slowing take-up of the technology—governments hinder rather than help such advances. Since the way to feed the world is not to bring more land under cultivation, but to increase yields, science is crucial.