The World Bank now believes that some 33 countries are in danger of being destabilised by food price inflation, while Ban Ki-Moon, the UN secretary-general, said that higher food prices risked wiping out progress towards reducing poverty and could harm global growth and security. Why has this happened so quickly? What caused the prices to rise?

Bob Watson, the chief scientist at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, puts the rise in the price of commodity crops such as wheat down to a number of factors: higher demand for grain to feed livestock in China, where increasing affluence means more people want to eat meat; drought in Australia for three years, meaning it has had to import wheat; market jitters brought on by the sight of several countries stopping exporting grain; speculators seeing a chance to make money; and, of course, the sudden extra demand for food crops such as maize for use in biofuels, in both Europe and the United States.

A few years ago, he points out, no one could have predicted that we would be aiming to produce five to 10 per cent of our petrol and diesel from crops.

[note who's talking - chief scientist at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, yet what's missing from the list of causes? Global Warming (we had a heavy rainfall year except for Australia). Isn't that strange. Well - it's kind of there - our war on warming looks to have its first true casualties (and they aren't bears)...][BTW: genetically modified food holds the best promise to feeding the world, but alas, that's not allowed either - for equally scientific reasons {bad policies have bad consequences}]

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