In a recent movie Margin Call, EndingHunger movement supporter Jeremy Irons plays a cold-hearted greedy banker.

“What happens to the real people when the market collapses?” asks a young banker in the movie depicting the beginning of the so-called “Lehman Shock”.

Wall Street, in the years leading up to the action, created enormous wealth using derivative financial products. These products involved trading of commodities – such as gold, oil, minerals but also real food items like sugar, rice, wheat and soybeans.

In “The Food Bubble,” published in Harper’s magazine, prominent food journalist Frederick Kaufman sets out his thesis that Wall Street actually starved millions of people through the blind pursuit of profits via food commodities trading.

In this TV interview, Kaufman explains how bankers looked to futures trading (buying or selling contracts to buy something at a future date at a pre-agreed price) of coffee, cocoa, corn, hogs and wheat and increased the demand for these products to a level where actual prices soared beyond the reach of the poor. It was a speculation-led inflation of food – something we all need to live on – he claims.

Kaufman reports that commodity investment is still attracting large sums of money and the trend is likely to continue. Some civil society organizations such as Oxfam are proposing to regulate the “financialization” of food commodities.

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