Increasing food prices caused by Local, not global, market forces

LONDON, United Kingdom (IRIN) – Banu Bibi’s shopping basket is becoming emptier. When she goes shopping in Dhaka, Bangladesh, she spends more than a year ago, but that money buys less. In 2010, for 134 taka (US$1.80), she could afford lentils and laundry soap, and the family’s favourite fish. This year she has to spend 185 taka ($2.50) just for the basics: more rice to make up for the lack of other food, and cheaper vegetables.

Banu Bibi lives in one of eight communities picked by a research team from the Institute of Development Studies in the UK to track the effects of rising food and fuel prices. For three years, with the help of partner organizations in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Zambia and Kenya, they have been talking to people in selected rural and urban communities about how rising prices affect their lives.

Banu Bibi’s experience is fairly typical. Her family is not starving; they still have food, but it is not the food they like and is not as nutritious as it could be. They certainly ate more and ate better before the food price shock and financial crisis of 2008. And across the world, homemakers are having to work harder, spending more time shopping or looking for food, and planning more carefully to stretch their budgets to feed their families.

A woman in Lango Baya, Kenya, spoke for many when she told the researchers: “You go to a shop to buy something with the same amount as you paid the previous day, only to be told that prices have risen.”

Although food and fuel prices did fall after the initial spike in 2008, they never went back to their previous levels, and this year they have jumped again. Only one of the four countries studied has experienced some respite this year – Zambia, where the price of maize, the staple food, has not increased.

Local locus

While the two previous studies concentrated on the mechanisms people used to cope with the rising prices, this time the researchers decided to ask some more political questions – why did people think prices were so high? Who was to blame? And what should be done about it?

“It was an interesting time, with the Arab Spring and unrest around the world, and we wanted to ask how people felt about the food and fuel price rises,” the research team leader, Naomi Hossain, told an audience at the University of Sussex, recently.

Her presentation coincided with the publication of a report into the global causes of rising prices by the British charity, Christian Aid. It analyzed recent movements on commodity markets, and concluded that much-vilified hedge funds were not the real culprits, instead singling out pension funds. They have very large pots of money, and have been pulling out of volatile stocks and shares and investing in funds linked to a basket of commodity prices, forcing fund managers to protect their positions by buying commodity futures on such a scale that they move the market.

But although commodity price rises are now an international phenomenon, extensively reported in the media, the people Hossain and her colleagues spoke to only looked for causes within their own country, citing hoarding and speculation, changing climate and environmental problems in their own area, and – overwhelmingly – their governments’ failure to care about the poor.

One interviewee in Bangladesh told them, “I don’t believe in this global market story at all. It is just an excuse for the government not to do anything.”

Hossain describes “a real failure of global civil society to get people to see how their livelihoods are connected to the global economy. I am not surprised people prefer local causes. It gives people a sense of agency; if it’s a global problem, then what can they do?”

Moral focus

But she has a certain sympathy for governments. There are more social protection schemes in place, for instance, than at the time of the first survey, despite governments having their budgets squeezed, but even so they get little credit.

Those who believe the government should “do something”, suggest banning exports, controlling prices, punishing hoarders and subsidizing basic foodstuffs. The researchers found a sense that it was the moral duty of a government to provide for its people, sometimes linked to notions of democracy. A woman in Kenya told them, “In the new constitution, we have the right to be provided [with] food by the government.”

The moral sense also extended to the business community. A rural doctor in Bangladesh said, “The businessmen should get some moral teaching. If they were afraid of Allah and conducted business honestly, the situation would improve.”

All in all, says Hossain, “There is a popular consensus about what is legitimate, about social norms and obligations. People set moral limits to the freedom of the markets.”

High food prices are not bad news for everyone. Another IDS research fellow, Xavier Cirera, pointed out that the rises followed a long period of low food prices, which had been very hard on farmers. “We always have to ask the question, what is the real price of food? And how can governments ensure better safety nets for the poor while ensuring that traders pass the benefits of price increases back to the producers? The evidence is that farmers are getting some benefit and are responding. But they are not realizing the full benefit of higher prices.”

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– Provided by Integrated Regional Information Networks.

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Finding A Path Through The ‘Gobbledygook’ Of The Insurance Market

Washington, DC, United States (KaiserHealth) – My ZIP code is a black hole for individual health insurance.

That’s what I recently discovered when I tried to find the coverage I want at an affordable price. What hubris I had.

My story started in 2009, when my position as a journalism professor at a small college was eliminated, and I lost my health benefits along with the job. In the ensuing months, as the clock ticked on my COBRA extension, I began to focus on finding a new health plan. I thought it would be a matter of dealing with mild sticker shock and doing comparative shopping. I was wrong.

As an experienced writer and researcher, I am used to making calls, asking questions and digging through hard-to-understand details. But it never occurred to me that the answers I uncovered about Tompkins County, N.Y. — a paradise of farmland, lakes and waterfalls close to the cultural attractions of Ithaca, home for me and Cornell University — would be so frustrating. It turns out it’s one of the state’s worst places to find good individual health coverage.

When I tell people about my dilemma, they get curious — even participatory. “Did you try a professional group?” they ask. “Did you try an online broker?” (Yes and yes.) Maybe they get caught up in my story because, unlike many people with tales of insurance woes, I’m in my fifties and healthy. My story doesn’t involve a medical condition that’s unsolvable or hard to talk about. Or maybe it’s just that my experience lights a path, however convoluted, through the insurance gobbledygook.

I started my quest with Aetna, my COBRA insurer. Under New York state law, I thought I had “conversion rights” — meaning I could convert my former employer’s group coverage, the basis for my COBRA plan, to individual coverage. Though the full monthly cost was already $565, and I worried I wouldn’t be able to afford any increases that kicked in when it became an individual plan, it was great insurance — providing excellent benefits and the ability to choose my own doctors. But it turned out my cost concerns were not even relevant. There is a caveat in the law: self-insured employers are subject to federal, not state, regulation. And because my former employer is self insured — meaning Aetna administers the plan but the college assumes all the financial risk — the conversion option did not exist.

After this idea evaporated, I explored possibilities on the website of The Freelancers Union, a professional association that offers its own health insurance in New York. Five plan choices popped up. Great, I thought. Then I clicked further to read about the plans’ residency requirements and up came a map. The right side of the state — covering 34 counties that share borders with New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont and Canada — was colored in blue. These counties are the lucky ones. Those on the left — 28 counties that border more of Pennsylvania and Canada, extending all the way to Lake Erie and Lake Ontario — were white, meaning no Freelancers Union health insurance. That’s where Tompkins County is.

This development was crushing. Somewhere along the way, the notion had lodged in my head that if I ever turned to freelance writing as my full-time job, I could get benefits through this type of organization. But — at least as far as I could tell — there are no such groups with health plans in my area.

I felt stupid. I also was getting curious, which happens whenever I feel stupid. The reporter in me wanted to know what the heck was going on. But the consumer in me needed a health plan. So I kept looking.

I tried other websites, starting with AARP. The site directs consumers to an AARP-branded Aetna plan. I entered my ZIP code and got the same response: the plan was “not available in your area.” Next, at a top-rated insurance broker site, my ZIP code brought up one result. The $561-a-month GHI policy covered annual physical and gynecologic exams, prescription drugs with a co-pay, hospitalization and outpatient surgery. But it did not cover, among other things, any other office visits; inpatient physical therapy; ER professional charges; diagnostic admissions; and diagnostic lab tests. To me, that seems like too much money to spend for what amounts to catastrophic coverage.

Curiosity was getting the better of me, so I did some random comparisons on the same website. Zip codes in the District of Columbia; Seattle; Fairbanks, Alaska; and New York City offered 80, 45, 56 and 16 insurance choices, respectively. I also tried random rural areas. Residents of Aladdin, Wyo., had 27 plan choices, starting at $380 a month. Residents of Amelia, Neb., had 87, starting at $133.05.

In search of clarity, I visited the New York state insurance website and discovered a whole new possibility: Healthy NY, a subsidized program for low-income people. Several different insurers offer the same basic menu of coverage through different regional HMOs, which charge different rates.

At first I ruled it out because I wouldn’t be able to choose my own doctors, which has always been very important to me. But I was starting to feel desperate. And I qualified for the plan because it just so happens that in January, I made less than $2,269. I never imagined I would be glad to have a dry spell with my freelancing.

I was not surprised to discover that, although New Yorkers in many other parts of the state can choose a Healthy NY insurer from several options, I only had one: Excellus BlueCross BlueShield. I was just glad to learn that I could get insurance. A phone call led to an additional choice, through the same insurer, that would let me see my own doctors. But it would have cost around $1,400 a month, which is the same as my mortgage. There was also a plan for sole proprietors, but I didn’t qualify.

At this point I went into full reporter mode. I called Troy Oechsner, New York state deputy superintendent for health, and asked him about my scarcity of coverage options and the high costs associated with them. He told me that some other rural areas in the state are in a similar fix, and he said, “For an insurer to get into the area of Tompkins County, where Excellus has such a large hold on the commercial market, is really difficult.”

Ah. That rings a bell. I remembered reading a very similar conclusion in a 2009 United Hospital Fund report: “Entering Central New York is entering the Excellus zone” — a 15-county region where “the region’s nonprofit BCBS plans vigorously defend their turf.” Who do they defend it against? Mostly for-profit insurers, which have a much stronger foothold in downstate areas, including greater New York City. Nonprofits have historically claimed upstate markets (which include Central New York). In my region, Excellus in particular dominates, with a strong record of well-established health-provider relationships.

Not only am I in the Excellus zone, said Oechsner, but I’ve stumbled into “the plight of the individual market in New York.” It’s a decades-long saga in which the state “traded the problem of a group of people who can’t get insurance at any price for another problem, which is that our individual rates are out-of-control expensive,” he said. In other words, the state gave up some of its power to regulate rate increases in exchange for guarantees of access to quality coverage for everyone — although as recently enacted legislation is phased in, the state is regaining more control over the increases.

I still didn’t get why the Freelancers Union insurance isn’t available to me. So I called Chief Operating Officer Ann Boger, who explained that the group’s plan in New York is linked to the service area of Empire BlueCross BlueShield. I knew from my other research that Empire can’t operate in Excellus territory without giving up the BlueCross BlueShield brand. Boger also said that offering insurance in rural areas is a challenge. “The nature of insurance is that it works best organized is around large numbers,” she added.

What about those rural areas I randomly sampled on the broker website? My answer came from Peter Newell, director of the United Hospital Fund’s Health Insurance Project. It’s simple: I didn’t compare the coverage. He talked of plans that have limited benefits, ratings for gender and age that push costs much higher than advertised, and exclusions for people with preexisting conditions. Broker websites, for all their ease of use, don’t instantly compare apples to apples. “If you compare my neighborhood to someone else’s neighborhood, you’ve got to think about those things,” said Newell.

Newell told me the federal health care reform should help me eventually — particularly with the establishment of health insurance exchanges that should yield more choices.

But for now, time has run out. I have signed up for the high deductible option in Healthy NY, with a drug benefit, for $296.48 a month. The deductible is $1,200 a year. I’m approaching this choice as a stop-gap measure, although, as I told Oechsner, I now have a strong incentive for limiting my income.

His response: “There’s no way to sugar coat it: You’re right. If you make too much money, individual health insurance in New York gets very expensive.”

I also have one foot out the door as I weigh my professional prospects. If I move, especially if I’m making a living as a freelancer, my first criterion in choosing a location will be something I’ve never before considered: the availability of good health insurance.

– Provided by Kaiser Health News.

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FTSE today: market report – as it happened March 29, 2011

US stocks close higher, shrugging off downgrades of Portugal and Greece

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La Nina deepens fears of poor Kansas wheat crop

ANZ hardens forecasts that Kansas wheat will become a market “flashpoint”, citing a key weather indicator, as hoped-for snowfall eludes crops

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An Experienced Financial Services Provider India Will Ensure Profits

Though saving for a rainy day is a wise decision. But only savings today are not enough. You need to invest your hard-earned money for it to multiply and investing smart is the way to go. The most common investment instruments used by people today are National Savings Certificates, Post office saving accounts, mutual funds, shares, bonds, derivatives etc.

Here, when one is considering share s as an option it can be done for a long or short term durations. Short term investments often call for monthly or even daily attention to the markets. Select a good Financial services provider India to help you make wise decisions or handle your finances if you do not have the time for the same.

Once you select a reputed and experienced Financial services provider India you can assure that your investments will fetch you good returns. These service providers are known to provide you accurate data, research and analysis of the shares in which you wish to invest and this leads to better returns. They are aware of the fact that the market is full of risks and opportunities. Profit and loss are part of the game and smart service providers know what action to take at a particular time. This knowledge helps you make the right moves and judge the market conditions appropriately and thus earn money at every possible opportunity.

One important advice that every Financial services provider India will give you is to never put all your eggs in a single basket. If the market crashes, this might be the last financial decision you make and thus end up losing the entire invested amount. Multiple options should be selected so that you can play safe and not end up making substantial losses.

Why Take Risks In The Gold Market?

Anyone who has traded in the stock market knows that there is always some risk involved, this is true of the gold market as well. Most of the trades in the gold market are OTC trades, usually between mining companies and banks. What many people are talking about when they say gold market is actually a futures market or options market. Many people who are new to stock trading will have no idea what a futures market or options market is. These are generally more advanced trading strategies.

Trading on the gold market can most closely resemble forex trading. In both cases you are gambling on what the price or value of the gold or money will be worth in the future. While there are strategies to reduce you chance of loss it is still a risk each time you choose to make a trade. Even with the gold IRA accounts you will find that the account offers you the chance to invest in newly minted coins or bars rather than in gold stocks. Unless you are considering purchasing stock in a gold mining company there is really no gold stock as such. Investing in gold coins or bars is a much more secure way of investing in your future.

A safer investment than the gold market may be gold coins. While coins cannot be actively traded on a market there is a thriving trade for those interested in investing in gold coins. Certified gold coins are guaranteed to be in the specified condition that they are sold as. Pricing for gold coins in generally based on the actual amount of gold used to create them. The gold coins most often bought for investment purposed are newly minted.

Another option is buying rare or antique gold coins; however, this can be a riskier proposition unless you know a lot about the coins you are considering. With rare or antique gold coins the value is not based on the gold content alone but on the age, rarity, and condition of the coins being sold. It is wise to make sure that any rare or antique gold coin you are considering has been certified by either the PCGS or NGC standard before you purchase it. Investing in rare and antique gold coins can have just as much risk involved as the gold market does.