By Paul Homewood
h/t Patsy Lacey
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For millennia, food production and pricing have been disrupted by the weather, with one-off events such as heatwaves, droughts, flooding or frosts cutting harvests and raising prices. War and disease are also factors, as the world saw recently after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the swine fever that swept through China’s pig population.
But another, more sustained thread has run through many sharp increases in food prices. From oranges in Brazil to cocoa in west Africa; olives in southern Europe to coffee in Vietnam, permanently shifting weather patterns as a result of climate change are reducing crop yields, squeezing supplies and driving up prices.
Adam Davis, co-founder of global agricultural hedge fund Farrer Capital, says climate change has helped drive up prices for a long list of food commodities trading at higher levels this year. “Wheat is up 17 per cent, palm oil 23 per cent . . . sugar 9 per cent and pork 21 per cent,” he says. For the consumer, the “lag effect of those high commodity prices is not going away”.
A third of the food price increases in the UK in 2023 was down to climate change, according to the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit think-tank.
“There’s a material impact from climate change on global food prices,” says Frederic Neumann, chief Asia economist at HSBC. “It’s easy to shrug off individual events as being isolated, but we’ve just seen such a sequence of abnormal events and disruptions that, of course, add up to climate change impact.”
Such repeated events result in “a permanent impact on the ability to supply food,” argues Neumann. Food price rises once considered temporary are becoming a source of persistent inflationary pressure.
Globally, annual food inflation rates could rise by up to 3.2 percentage points per year within the next decade or so as a result of higher temperatures, according to a recent study by the European Central Bank and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
https://www.ft.com/content/125e89c0-308a-492f-ae8e-6834847d1186
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Meanwhile back in the real world:
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https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#compare
The only factor pushing up food prices is the consistently high price of oil and gas, the intended result of attempts by western governments to throttle off new drilling. This impacts both the operating costs for farmers and also the price of fertiliser.
If any of these lies were true, do you honestly believe those same governments would be wanting to rewild large areas of the planet?