New rules adopted today by the Commission to limit food and commodity price speculation will prove ineffective in ending a gambling which puts the lives of millions of people in the developing world at high risk. 

Banks in France, Germany, Austria and the United Kingdom have pulled back from speculative trading in agricultural commodities, a controversial practice that Oxfam opposes because it is associated with food price volatility.

Land eight times the size of the UK was sold off globally in the last decade, enough to grow food for a billion people, or the equivalent to the number of people who go hungry in the world today.

Europe’s crisis must be fixed because it is becoming a serious drain on developing countries already reeling from volatile food prices and aid cuts. But it’s not good enough for the G20 to fixate on Europe and forget about the rest of the world.

Food prices are a matter of life and death to many in the developing world.