Top 10 hedge funds made £1.5bn profit from Ukraine war food price spike

theguardian.com:

Hedge funds have emerged as some of the biggest winners from the global food price spike that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with the world’s 10 biggest hedge funds alone making profits estimated at nearly $2bn.

Analysis of the profits of the top 10 hedge funds for the first quarter of last year shows that they are likely to have made about $1.9bn (£1.5bn) from trading in two food commodities, grain and soya beans, in the run-up to and immediate aftermath of the invasion.

The findings, compiled by Greenpeace and the non-profit journalism organisation Lighthouse Reports, have raised fresh questions over the role of hedge funds and other speculators in inflating food prices, as a global cost of living crisis continues to bite. After the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, moved to invade last February, prices of many key commodities – many of which had already been on the rise as the world recovered from the Covid-19 pandemic – shot up in response.

Olivier De Schutter, co-chair of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems and UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, said: “Hedge funds and financial speculators have made obscene profits by betting on hunger and exacerbating it. That cannot be right. At the start of the Ukraine war, financial investors piled into grains and commodities in large numbers, seeking to capitalise on uncertainty and rising food prices, and they hit the jackpot.”

He said the jolts to the food market since the Ukraine invasion showed how dangerous speculation in food commodities could be, with the effects of these extraordinary profits being felt by the vulnerable. It is difficult to disentangle the impact of speculation from food prices that may already be