Reviews for Stolen Fruit: The Tropical Commodities Disaster

The average rating for Stolen Fruit: The Tropical Commodities Disaster based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-04-05 00:00:00 Gary Givens Stolen sovereignty [Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com Inc., listed on Nasdaq, which fully owns Goodreads.com and in 2013 posted revenues for $74 billion and $274 million profits. Intellectual property and labor require compensation. Amazon.com Inc. is also requested to provide assurance that its employees and contractors' work conditions meet the highest health and safety standards at all the company's sites]. An honest attempt, now outdated, at proposing solutions to a problem restrictively defined as "the tropical commodities disaster" but that can be understood more broadly as resource looting in (no longer meant to be) developing countries. The main problem with the book, with the benefit of hindsight, is that its factual basis no longer holds. Tropical commodities prices, which had plummeted to historical lows in 2002, have reached new peaks in the following years, causing - or thanks to - a commodity trading frenzy that has involved anything from hedge funds to private retail investors (an ad for an online commodity trading service is displayed next to this review as I write, evidence of Google Adwords' subtle intelligence). The cause identified by the author for the price fall was, somewhat naively, oversupply and its cure had of course to be a reduction in supply through international co-ordination among producing countries. Being written by a former commodity trader, the book is surprisingly blind to the phenomenon of financialization, insisting on 'real economy' solutions to a problem caused by the unreal economy. However, the author confesses retiring from commodity trading in 1986, that is at the dawn of its financialization. The author's well-meaning 'expertise' - put at the service of NGOs and UN agencies - is thus double-edged in the sense of helping the author's clients - contrary to the author's good intentions - not to address the root causes of the disaster (in good company with academic Alfred Maizels). The author's backwardness is testified by the total self-assurance with which he declares in 2003 that OPEC is successful at controlling oil's prices, when these had been pegged since 1986 to super-volatile Brent crude oil future prices as formed on London-based IPE (now ICE), which continue to bear no connection whatsoever to demand-supply ratios (commentators find a connection only when prices are up, never when they are down, as now - in general to blame China for pressure on demand or Middle Eastern countries for restraining supply, or both). The stolen fruit, whether commodity prices are up or down, is the producing countries' ability to influence their own development path, now bequeathed to a plethora of supranational institutions, among which are global venues for commodity price formation. It's not a matter of helping poor farmers, but of sovereign peoples making decisions about their future and the role that agriculture should play in it (hopefully marginal). In this respect, international co-ordination among producing countries is still an important goal. Their first co-ordinated decision could be that commodity prices formed in Chicago or New York are no longer of any relevance to them, as a first step towards getting their sovereignty back.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-05-12 00:00:00 Mohamad Imran Anyone from the tropics. this is the book to read. You will understand everything that has to do with socio-economical condition within the tropics