The food price series: Short intro

As announced in the last couple of posts, here’s the first part of my new series looking at recent global food price developments, the driving forces behind them and what’s likely to happen in the long run.

It’s going to be a loose series of short pieces, with new bits added every few days in the coming months, focusing on:

• the fairly drastic ups and downs in food price inflation that have come about in the period from 2007 to today;

• aspects driving changes in global food commodity prices, such as population growth, urbanisation, the rise of new middle classes in emerging markets, agricultural productivity, environmental pollution, global warming, and shifts in the financial markets;

• how changing food commodity prices trickle through supply chains to finally arrive at supermarkets and consumers;

• what the social and developmental implications are of volatile food prices in both developed and emerging markets; and

• what the long-term outlook could be for food price inflation beyond the current period of economic recovery and far into the next decade.

Hope you’ll find it interesting. The first bunch of charts should go live early next week.

Please let me know your thoughts if there are any specific aspects to food price inflation that you’d like to see discussed here.

Bye for now,

Boris