Peak Food

Wheat and other grain prices keep rising and are now well over double the price of a year ago, reflecting the very tight supply situation. We at Peak Food have been saying for some time that we are facing a food crisis, but still hope that this is just a blip and not the start of the real thing.

Of course, farmers needed a rise on the £60-£70 per tonne they have been getting for the last few years but the recent jump will mean real hardship for some. In the West with our processed, packaged food, the grain element is usually a small proportion of the retail price and the price increases should cause no real problems, but spare a thought for the hundreds of millions of people in the world who live on a few dollars per day and buy basic food. They will find that the cost has nearly doubled and that may mean the difference between struggling by or not. If the world is short of grain, demand will have to fall to the level of supply and this will happen by the poorest eating less.

On our site, we have listed the many threats to food supplies. Of those, the ones causing the present problems are:

•  Climate change
•  competition from biofuel production, and
• millions of people in Asia moving up the food chain.