Bruce Bisset: Crops focus of hedge fund locusts

Seems to me if there is any doubt about money being the root of evil, the flash suits running the speculative finance industry are doing their best to dispel it.
Having brought the global banking system to its knees via sub-prime mortgage scams, the boys who started the panic - the hedge fund managers - are now dabbling in a different type of property rort.
They're buying land - lots and lots of land - in some of the world's poorest countries, and using it to grow commodity crops such as cut flowers or for biofuels.
Displacing millions of small farmers and giving little or nothing back to local economies.
According to the US Oakland Institute, hedge funds purchased or leased nearly 60 million hectares of land in Africa in 2009 alone. That's an area the size of France.
Moreover, it's claimed a large number of land deals are being done without proper contracts.
Like the blankets and muskets "trades" with Maori in the early colonial days, tribal chiefs are reportedly being swayed with Scotch whisky and promised jobs - and waking up to a hangover of impoverishment.
Having to find somewhere else to live, and somehow else to exist, while their country gets "made over" for speculative profit.
In this, the finance companies are aided and abetted by corrupt officials who, in return for lining their own pockets, offer unlimited water rights or tax waivers and the like.
Coupled with similar efforts by mercenary countries such as China and the Arab states - who at least pursue these schemes to produce food for their own folk - it's no wonder a billion people are battling starvation despite sufficient food being grown to feed all.
What has this to do with us? Well, if you have money invested in any sort of managed fund you might consider whether it's being used to bankroll such regimes. Given the interminable inter-connectedness of global money flows, it very likely is.
Even the now-kneecapped KiwiSaver fund has been shown to have invested in arms and nuclear weapons technology, so why would your broker's recommended top-rate fund not be profiting from the blood of some suckered Africans?
If that possibility concerns you, demand to know. If your fund can't provide you iron-clad guarantees, take your money elsewhere. There are genuine ethical funders - such as the Bay's own Prometheus Finance - who make a point of backing fair trade and/or green tech.
Seek them out, and put your money where your conscience is or would like to be, because the only way to prevent unscrupulous investments is to deny them the cash they need to run.
However, it's difficult to know just how "clean" a given fund is. Financiers cover themselves through loopholes, excusing their lack of knowledge by using "baskets" of securities, or trade-weighted indexes, or other moveable feast devices so that no one really knows what is being invested in, or where.
This is one significant part of the global finance system that needs a drastic overhaul. Because, as it stands, there is no transparency - unless you call a black hole transparent.
So long as money is allowed to hide money, and those who deal in it are allowed to proclaim innocence as to how it's used, these dire inequalities will continue to exist, and the poor of the world will continue to be mercilessly exploited. At a time when we are supposedly creaking towards reform and instituting global schemes to manage climate change and peak oil and the like, how can ordinary citizens - who provide much of these funds through their taxes as well as investments - place any faith or credibility in their success when once the cash disappears down the slot it becomes untraceable?
Then, too, governments seem to delight in subverting supposedly "dedicated" funds. Such as the suggestion carbon credits from our emissions trading scheme will be used to rebuild Christchurch instead of ameliorating climate change. As much as one can sympathise with Canterbury's need, such "diversions" lend credence to the idea an ETS is a gigantic scam. When it should be a saviour.
Just as investment in food production in Africa should be a saviour - but, in the hands of faceless unaccountable hedge fund managers, is instead a catastrophe.
That's the right of it.
Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.