There’s both good news and bad news on the food front.   The good news is that wheat, maize and pulses production during the current year will be the highest that India has seen. Wheat production was expected to be high, thanks to the twin advantages of a high procurement price —- higher than international prices —- and favourable Weather conditions. But pulses production too has zoomed, because of the soaring prices in the...

Global wheat harvests may trail demand for a second year, spurring hoarding and further price gains, said the United Nations. “Whenever you get the market as tight as we are now, hoarding becomes widespread,” Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, said in an interview by phone from Rome. Wheat, corn and soybeans soared to the highest levels since 2008 yesterday as a U.S. government report showed...

With higher sowing of wheat, pulses, sugarcane, cotton and oilseeds reported this rabi season, there are expectations of a bumper crop production this year. The total food grains output is expected to be 232.07 million tonnes, which is only marginally lower than the record production of 234.47 million tonnes in 2008-09. Announcing the second advance estimates of food grains production for the 2010-11 crop year last week, Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar...

So what caused the French Revolution? Food prices did. A hailstorm destroyed French crops, food prices rose 88 per cent in one year, and hungry Parisians turned on their rulers. Ditto with the Tian-an-men showdown exactly 200 years later, in 1989: consumer prices rose 21 per cent in a country that had known virtually no inflation under Communist rule. The Suharto regime got overthrown in Indonesia in 1998 after food...

We’re in the midst of a global food crisis — the second in three years. World food prices hit a record in January, driven by huge increases in the prices of wheat, corn, sugar and oils. These soaring prices have had only a modest effect on U.S. inflation, which is still low by historical standards, but they’re having a brutal impact on the world’s poor, who spend much if not...