Is the world running out of food, alongside oil, metals, water and much else?

The Fed is fuelling the catastrophe of fast rising raw material prices

Jeremy Warner
Telegraph

The answer to this question, according to a recent OECD and UN Food and Agriculture Organisation report is a definitive no; global agricultural production is on track to satisfy the expected long-term increase in demand, the OECD reckons.

Yet it’s little thanks to public policy, which in combination with the current craze among financial speculators for commodities, seems hell bent on driving up prices to what for millions of the world’s poor may be starvation levels.

There are two main ways in which policymakers are insidiously interfering with the usual rules of supply and demand for raw materials, and myriad different smaller ones. We’ll leave aside the smaller ones, such as China’s attempt to leverage its monopoly of rare earth metals for geo-political purposes, and concentrate instead on the two biggies.

One is the policy of ultra-cheap money in advanced economies to fight the economic crisis; and the other, more commodity-specific one, is massive public subsidy for the production of bio-fuels. Food is being elbowed out by pursuit of “clean fuel”.

As long as the US Federal Reserve remains accommodative, commodity prices are likely to keep rising. We are not yet back to anything like the extremes seen in the bubble of 2007/8. Oil prices at $140 a barrel, it will be recalled, were what helped tip the world economy into recession. Yet by long-run historic standards, both food and mineral prices are still exceptionally elevated and going higher.

The underlying reasons are well known. Rapid industrialisation and urbanisation in the developing world has created a “super-cycle” that won’t ease until these countries bump up against the limits of their growth potential. Most would agree there’s some way to go.

Into this already troubling mis-match between growing demand and finite supply stumbles the US Fed with a loose money policy of unprecedented proportions.

Read Full Article