Financial & Risk Management
What is risk?For today's "breadbasket of the world" farmers, the answer is simple: it is an all-englobing, all-encompassing thing. For these folks, it would be shorter to answer "What is not risk?"
The reason is that today's food markets fluctuate quite a lot, with prices for staples generally spiralling downwards. Successful Third-World farmers, driven to specialize in export monocrops, find themselves at the mercy of those monocrops' prices, and suddenly find themselves with far less money. They suffer, but the ones who suffer even more are the less successful farmers, long ago driven from the land by the successful ones, and living already difficult lives as wage hands on the more successful farmers' land. (Some of them gave up farming altogether, and now live in the cities, working in factories if they're lucky.)
Cargill has a solution to this spiral of trouble: it's called ThinkFast™ investment solutions. With operations on four continents and a long history of trading in global financial and commodity markets, Cargill is well positioned to benefit from market fluctuations and to otherwise manage risk, and to provide investment opportunities to those rare, fast-thinking farmers who stand to benefit from this state of things, and with no need for simpler sustenance options.