Prevent food corporations using financial and climate crises to generate huge profits and fuel inflation

Dr Sophie Van Huellen

Dr Van Huellen is a Senior Lecturer in Development Economics. Her research focus is on primary commodity markets (mainly food commodities), commodity dependency, financialisation, global production networks, macro-financial linkages, and machine learning applications in economics.

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Financial market speculation drives high food prices in the wake of expected shortages during moments of crisis. These price shocks have been used by food corporations to generate record profits.

Now is the time to...

• revise regulatory regimes for the financial trading in food commodities, food indexes, and food corporations;
• identify the actors profiting from current fragilities to identify areas for regulatory intervention;
• finance a just transition towards a more environmentally sustainable, equitable, and less fragile food system.

Find out more

• van Huellen, S. ‘Who is profiting from the food crisis? Speculation, rent-seeking and rent-extraction in our food sector’  The Left in the European Parliament (online publication)
• van Huellen, S (2022) ‘Inflation: how financial speculation is making the global food price crisis worse’, The Conversation 
• van Huellen, S. (2020) ‘Too much of a good thing? Speculative effects on commodity futures curves’, Journal of Financial Markets
• van Huellen, S. (2019), ‘Approaches to price formation in financialised commodity markets’, Journal of Economic Surveys
• van Huellen, S. (2017) ‘How financial investment distorts food prices: evidence from U.S. grain markets’ The Journal of the International Association of Agricultural Economics 

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