The Financial Times reported Sunday that the commodity trading industry “made record gross profits of more than $115 billion from trading activities last year.”

That total is up 60% compared to 2021, with the independent trading houses Trafigura, Vitol, and Glencore among the biggest beneficiaries, the Financial Times noted.

As much of the world reeled from high energy and food prices that left millions struggling to heat their homes and feed their families, commodity trading firms that benefit from extreme market volatility brought in record-breaking profits in 2022, capitalizing on chaos spurred by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“Financial players such as hedge funds also enjoyed big gains, earning an estimated $12 billion from trading activities in 2022 compared with less than $3 billion the year before,” the newspaper added.

Ernst Frankl, a partner at Oliver Wyman and one of the report’s authors, told the Financial Times that 2022 “was a bit of a perfect storm across all the commodities, from a trading opportunity perspective.”

“Volatility is the lifeblood of what traders need in order to trade,” Frankl said.

Experts have argued that commodity speculators are not only benefiting from extreme market volatility—they’re to some degree causing major price swings that have real-world consequences.

“We’re in a market where speculators are driving prices up,” Michael Greenberger, former head of the Division of Trading and Markets at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, told Mongabay last year.

World Food Program (WFP) projects that more than 345 million people will be “food insecure” this year, more than double the 2020 number.

Amid Global Hunger Crisis, Commodity Speculators Reap Record-Shattering Profits (commondreams.org)

 The number of children afflicted by food poverty in the UK nearly doubled in January from a year ago, The Guardian has reported, citing a survey by the think tank Food Foundation.

According to the findings, 22% of households polled reported either skipping meals or not eating for a whole day last month. In January 2022, the figure stood at only 12%. The overall number of British children suffering from a lack of food has now reached almost 4 million, data showed.

The alarming trend comes as the country suffers from record-high food inflation, spurred by soaring energy costs. The indicator now stands at 17.1%, according to the latest figures released by market researcher Kantar earlier this week, with milk, eggs, and margarine showing the fastest price growth. The cost-of-living crisis is further exacerbated by the government’s recent decision to cut back support for household energy bills.

The public is now urging the British authorities to expand free school meals across the country. A separate survey by the Food Foundation found that 80% of respondents were in favor of making all British children eligible for free meals in school. Currently, only households with an annual income under £7,400 qualify for free meals, leaving some 800,000 children living in poverty but ineligible for the benefit, according to Child Poverty Action Group.

“By extending free school meals to more children in England in the next budget, the government could deliver a policy change that is popular with voters, targeted and timely, and truly delivers on levelling up,” Anna Taylor, the CEO of Food Foundation, said, commenting on the findings.

According to London Mayor Sadiq Khan, free school meals could save families about £440 per child annually. Earlier this month, he announced that London schools would offer free meals to all primary school pupils for a year starting in September.

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 A growing number of British pubs are closing down due to rising energy bills and inflation, data published by accountancy firm UHY Hacker Young has shown.

According to the report, 512 pub and bar companies collapsed in the UK last year amid the cost-of-living crisis, up from 280 in 2021. The firm says the number of such insolvencies jumped as much as 83% in 2022.

“The cost-of-living crisis, including interest rate rises, has impacted consumer habits, making them less likely to spend on ‘non-essentials’, including a drink or a meal at a pub. Rail strikes have also prevented many customers from travelling to pubs in town or city centres,” the report’s authors state.

Inflation is driving up costs that pubs themselves have to pay for beer and food supplies, the findings show. As many of the establishments have little to no savings or capacity to borrow following the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns, more of them are being forced to close their doors.

“This is a particularly difficult period for pub and bar owners, who find they need to spend more and more while earning less and less. Following an extended period of lost revenues during the pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis has been the final nail in the coffin for many,” said Peter Kubik, one of the analysts behind the report.

The news comes after the British government announced plans to slash the aid it provides to businesses and public sector organizations for the payment of energy bills.

The current Energy Bill Relief Scheme, which was introduced in September last year, has reportedly provided £18 billion ($22 billion) to businesses to help with soaring energy costs. However, the scheme comes to an end in March, and a new support package will reportedly see funding reduced to £5.5 billion ($6.7 billion).

“The spiralling cost of energy has been our members’ number one concern for close to a year now and remains so… As this data demonstrates, there is no doubt that energy costs are causing businesses to fail – people simply cannot afford to make ends meet and are left with no choice but to shut up shop, meaning a community loses its pub or brewery, and the jobs and livelihoods that go with it, for good,” Emma McClarkin, CEO of the British Beer and Pub Association, told news outlet City A.M.

Britain’s hospitality sector could lose thousands of jobs amid soaring energy costs, the British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA) has warned, as it called on the government to extend a lifeline for the industry.

According to a BBPA report on Wednesday, citing data from Oxford Economics, a further 2,000 pubs are at risk of closure, threatening 25,000 jobs. The research suggested that on-trade beer sales will decline by 9% in 2023-2024, which equates to 1 million fewer barrels of beer sold, or 288 million pints.

“The BBPA is calling on the government to use the Spring Budget to show it understands just how much pubs and breweries mean to their communities, and the pressures the sector is facing, and deliver a plan for sustainable growth with fair, modernized tax rates and a focus on skills and training needed to ensure pubs and breweries can thrive,” the association stated.

It also called on the chancellor to freeze duty rates, implement a significant increase in the discount for draft beer sold in pubs, and introduce the previously announced reduced rate for lower-strength beers from August 1.

In September 2022, the British government introduced the Energy Bill Relief Scheme, which has reportedly provided £18 billion ($22 billion) to businesses to help with soaring energy costs. However, the plan is due to come to an end in March, and a new support package will reportedly see funding reduced to £5.5 billion ($6.5 billion).

“After almost three years of extremely tough trading conditions due to lockdowns, an energy crisis, supply chain disruptions and more, now is a make-or-break moment to save our locals and breweries from failure now in the years to come, we need the government to act now or risk losing something very special forever,” said the BBPA’s chief executive, Emma McClarkin.

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 Age UK said it was “deeply concerned” about the plight of elderly people whose needs are not being met. Thousands of older people have died without getting the care they needed. Millions of older people in England awaiting care were “struggling to go to the toilet, eat, get dressed or wash because they can’t do these things unaided”.

 28,890 requests for people aged 65 and over to be given support in 2021-22 were recorded as them having died without any services being provided. The numbers equated to more than 550 deaths a week – or 79 a day.

Age UK’s director, Caroline Abrahams, said: “There isn’t enough social care to go round and so some older people are waiting endlessly for help they badly need. It is heartbreaking that on the latest figures, more than 500 older people a week are going to their graves without ever receiving the care and support to which they were entitled. Nor can the blame for this parlous situation be placed on the pandemic, for while it certainly didn’t help, social care services were struggling to secure enough staff and funding in the years preceding it.” She added, “Since then, all the evidence is that the position has not got any better and, on most measures, has continued to get worse.”

Abrahams said long waits for social care caused “huge distress to older people” and placed “intolerable pressure on their families…We fear there are many tragedies playing out silently behind closed doors.”

Growing old is inevitable but the way we get old is not. 

Older people in England dying without the care they need, says Age UK | Older people | The Guardian

 India is projected to become the most populous country in the world. India’s population has grown by a billion in the past 70 years

India’s fertility rate has dropped from an average of six children per woman in 1964 to 2.1 children per woman in 2020, according to UN data. That’s marginally below the replacement rate of 2.2 — i.e., the required number of births per woman to maintain a population. Improvements in health care and increasing life expectancy are likely to continue the momentum of population rise for a few more decades, according to experts.

It is predicted that India’s population will slowly grow to 1.7 billion by 2064 but then fall drastically. The US-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation has predicted that India’s population could fall back to around 1 billion by the end of the century.

Indian developmental economist Jean Dreze told DW, “What I’m saying is that I don’t see a population crisis. India has been a large country all this time and nevertheless, the economy is growing, and it is able to improve people’s living conditions, albeit slowly. And population growth is not going to continue much longer.”

The economist pointed out that the dependency ratio of children and elderly who don’t earn on those who do, had dropped drastically over the past decades.

“Having a large population is one thing but for that to be advantageous, we need to focus on the quality of the population,” Dreze said.

However, the majority of India’s population growth comes from rural and underprivileged areas around the Ganges basin, while the rise in income comes from the urban population. Inequality is on the rise. Moreover, a significant chunk of India is malnourished, unskilled and marginalized — and hence unable to meaningfully contribute to the nation’s development. The employment rate has been steadily declining since 2005. Per capita income — while rising — is still among the lowest in all of G20 countries.

Over 70% of India’s population cannot afford a healthy diet as of 2020 despite the fact that the cost of food remains relatively low by comparison to other countries.

How healthy are India’s 1.4 billion people? – DW – 03/04/2023

 At ICE facilities like Golden State Annex and Mesa Verde, work programmes, which ICE says are voluntary, pay detained people $1 per day for tasks like sanitation, laundry duty and maintenance.

Michael Childers, a professor of labour education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, testified that the company saved about $26.7m from 2011 to 2019 by using detained immigrants as labourers instead of hiring outside workers, whom they would have had to compensate with higher wages.

Andrew Free, a former immigration lawyer, told Al Jazeera that an “atmosphere of deprivation” is common in the company’s facilities, creating conditions where detainees feel pressured to work.

He explained, “If your daily meals don’t have enough nutrition or are of very poor quality, you have to buy food from the commissary to have a full diet,” he said. “The choice to work for $1 a day or face deprivation of basic necessities is not truly voluntary.”

The use of jailed workers to perform tasks such as maintenance and sanitation is common throughout the US criminal justice system, and social justice advocates have portrayed the practice as exploitative. Law enforcement organisations argue that imprisoned labourers are an economic boon to the state.

“Until I drop.” That’s how long 22-year-old Cruz Martinez says he is committed to carrying out his hunger strike against the conditions at immigration detention centres in the United States. “GEO is a billion-dollar company, and they’re paying us $1 a day,” he said. “They’re getting rich off of us.”

‘Slavery wages’ prompt hunger strike at ICE detention facilities | Prison News | Al Jazeera

 “

The division of society into a small over-rich class and a large propertyless working-class, causes this society to suffocate in its own surplus, while the great mass of its members is scarcely, or, indeed, not at all, protected from extreme want. Such a condition of things becomes daily more absurd and unnecessary. It can be abolished; it must be abolished.” – Engels

Capitalism is a tale of misery, exploitation, oppression, barbarity, cruelty and repression. Yet a tiny minority live in luxury. Capitalism needs to be overthrown. We need a socialist world. And that is only possible by organising many millions of working people around genuine socialist ideas and fighting relentlessly for our interest as a class. The only solution is for the workers to abolish capitalism by taking control of the means of production and ending the sale of labour power. Capitalism dehumanises people and turns them into robots. Capitalism maintains its profits on the basis of lowering and worsening the standards of the workers. The problem is not a crisis of natural scarcity or shortage. The capacity of producing wealth is greater than ever.

Reformers of capitalism urge that if only the capitalists would pay higher wages to the workers, enabling them to buy more of what they produce, there would be no crisis. This is utopian nonsense, which ignores the inevitable laws of capitalism — the drive for profits, and the drive of competition. The drive of capitalism is always to increase its profits by every possible means, to increase its surplus, not to decrease it. Individual capitalists may talk of the “gospel of high wages” in the hope of securing a larger market for their goods. But the actual drive of capitalism as a whole is the opposite. The force of competition compels every capitalist to cheapen the costs of production, to extract more output per worker for less return, to cut wages. Capitalism has no solution. any attempt to organise the growing productive power to meet human needs — the question does not even enter into their heads; it cannot arise within the conditions of capitalism.

 Only socialism can end the bonds of capitalist property rights and organise production to meet human needs. Once capitalism is overthrown, then and only then can production be organised in common for all, and every increase in production brings increasing abundance and leisure for all. This is the aim of the socialist revolution.

Only the socialist revolution can cut the bonds of capitalism and break the tangle of anarchic private property rights, conflicting interests and disorganisation that fetter production.

Without political power, no change. But what do we mean by “power”? Do we mean simply a change of government?

No. What is in question is not simply a change of government on top, but a change of class power; since our purpose, is not simply to carry through one or two legislative measures, but to change the whole class-nature of existing society. The capitalists own the means of production; the mass of the nation live at their mercy, depend on them for the means of life, and are in literal fact wage-slaves. To emancipate themselves, the workers of the world must abolish capitalism and establish socialism.

 United Nations chief Antonio Guterres in his speech on the opening day of the UN’s Least Developed Countries (LDC) summit in Qatar on Saturday, Guterres said that wealthy nations should provide $500bn annually to help others “trapped in vicious cycles” that block their efforts to boost economies and improve health and education.

“We are perfectly aware of the inequities created by our unfair global economic and financial system…Fossil fuel giants are raking in huge profits, while millions in your countries cannot put food on the table.”

He said, “Our global financial system was designed by wealthy countries, largely to their benefit. Deprived of liquidity, many of you are locked out of capital markets by predatory interest rates”  adding, poorer states were trapped in a “perfect storm for perpetuating poverty and injustice.”

Guterres said LDCs required a “minimum” $500bn a year to help overcome their problems, build up job-creating industries and repay debts. Richer countries have also promised, but failed, to produce hundreds of billions of dollars to help poorer states battle climate change. Guterres said the UN would “keep pushing for the resources already promised”.

UN chief condemns rich countries’ ‘vicious’ tactics against poor | News | Al Jazeera

 Millions of Yemenis require humanitarian assistance as the country continues to suffer from the fallout of a prolonged civil war.

 At a high-level UN event, global donors pledged US$1.2 billion in aid operations to Yemen in 2023.  The amount pledged remains well below the organisation’s target of US$4.3 billion. The UN missed its financing target for Yemen by US$2 billion last year.

Yemen’s inflation is up to 45 percent. Elsewhere, food prices surged by 58 percent. In 2022.

13 million people in Yemen relied on the UN’s World Food Program for basic staples. 

To date, the conflict has killed more than 375,000 people, sixty percent from indirect causes (mainly from malnutrition and disease). 

The war has also damaged the country’s civilian and physical infrastructure, including its oil sector – Yemen’s only source of foreign exchange.

Yemen continues to rely on foreign aid. “More than 21 million people, or two-thirds of the country’s population, will need humanitarian assistance in 2023,” said UN secretary-general António Guterres. He warned that aid funding would not provide a panacea for Yemen. “Humanitarian assistance is a band-aid. It saves people’s lives but cannot resolve the conflict itself.”

Among those in need, more than 17 million are understood to be living below Yemen’s poverty line. Meanwhile, an estimated 4.5 million Yemenis are internally displaced, largely due to climate-change-related events.

According to the UN, Yemen is “highly vulnerable” to the effects of rising global temperatures (notably arid weather). In recent years, severe droughts have exacerbated food shortages caused by the war.

UN Falls Short of Aid Pledge to Yemen Despite Peace Efforts | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

 Profits rather than labour costs and taxes have accounted for the lion’s share of domestic price pressures in the eurozone since 2021, according to the European Central Bank.

Europe’s companies are exploiting high inflation to increase their profit margins. Policymakers have repeatedly called for wage restraint but concerns are mounting that a bigger driver of the wave of price rises may be companies using inflation as an excuse to increase profit margins, a trend unions have described as “greedflation”.

A gathering of the ECB council was shown a slide presentation that revealed profit margins had been rising rather than falling – as would normally be expected when the price of raw materials and other business expenses such as transportation and wages rose.

“It’s clear that profit expansion has played a larger role in the European inflation story in the last six months or so,” said Paul Donovan, the chief economist at UBS Global Wealth Management.

ECB looking out for price gouging as fears grow over ‘greedflation’ | European Central Bank | The Guardian