The price of rice has more than doubled in the last year causing great hardship to many of the world’s poorest people.
 In the West, the cost of food is a very small part of our weekly outgoings and most of that cost is for processing, transport, packaging etc. When the price of the basic food ingredients such as wheat and barley goes up the effect is not usually too damaging.
By contrast, a large proportion of the world’s people were already spending up to 70% of their income on food so that a doubling of price makes their situation perilous to say the least.
The very worrying point is that these food shortages have not been caused by a sudden drop in production due to bad harvests, but by demand slowly overtaking supply. Last year consumption incresed by 0.9% to 424 million tonnes but production only increased by about 0.7%. The slow reduction in world stocks has now put the world’s poorest people in a very dangerous position because if we now had a series of poor harvests there would be widespread starvation. Unfortunatly, climate change increases the chance of this happening.
There have already been food riots in many countries and the people at most risk are those in countries that import much of their grain. When supplies are short, exporting countries quickly restrict exports to protect their own people and keep domestic prices down. There is already panic buying and hording but a bad harvest would make things much, much worse.