While Americans have focused on rising fuel prices over the past
month, food prices around the world are also skyrocketing,
outpacing the rate of inflation for other consumer products and
threatening to create a price bubble for the third time since
2008. Food prices have increased 4.4 percent in the last year
compared with a 2.9 percent rise for all consumer goods. Prices
on products like coffee and peanut butter have risen as much as
27 percent. And as with the spikes of 2008 and 2011, commodity
investors and speculators are largely to blame, according to one
study highlighted by Time: The New England Complex Systems
Institute released a study last week linking speculation in
global commodity markets to rising food prices. The study
indicates that spikes in food prices in 2008 and ’11 came
largely as a result of investor speculation and increased
ethanol conversion, in which corn is used for fuel rather than
food. The authors expect another “food bubble” to occur by 2013,
which “may lead to major social dis