Gabrielle Pickard
China.org
My mother-in-law loves to talk. She will spend hours on the telephone informing me about every last detail of her day’s activities, no matter how unimportant or trivial. My ears pricked up however when her latest whinge was about the rising price of her weekly shopping bill. “Tomatoes, bread, sugar and meat have all doubled in price in the last few weeks,” she exclaimed dramatically. With this year’s extreme and hostile weather, which destroyed the harvests in Russia and Pakistan, the cost of vegetables and other staple foods have reached a two-year high in many places – with rice and sugar reaching a record high. This stark increase in the cost of food is not only ruffling the feathers of my mother-in-law and her supermarket cronies, but also many food experts who are predicting that the increasing prices could ignite further political turmoil.
According to the Reuters-Jefferies commodity price indicator, not only has the price of meat recently reached a 20-year high, but the cost of wheat and maize throughout the globe has jumped a whopping 30 percent. Garlic in China, bread in Pakistan and tomatoes in Egypt are also at record highs, as the devastating affects of this year’s unpredictable weather pulsates across the globe.
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