Food prices around the world surged to a new historic peak in January, for the seventh consecutive month, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported today, adding that the prices are not likely to decline in the months ahead. According to the FAO, its latest Food Price Index, a commodity basket that tracks monthly changes in global food prices, averaged 231 points in January and was up 3.4 per...

World food prices hit a new record high in January after rising for a seventh consecutive month, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said Thursday, warning the poor would be hit hardest. The FAO Food Price Index, which monitors monthly price changes for a basket of commodities, averaged 231 points in January -- up 3.4 percent from December and its highest level since FAO started measuring food prices in...

Billions of dollars are being made by investors in a speculative "food bubble" that's created record food prices, starving millions and destabilising countries, experts now conclude. Wall Street investment firms and banks, along with their kin in London and Europe, were responsible for the technology dot-com bubble, the stock market bubble, and the recent U.S. and UK housing bubbles. They extracted enormous profits and their bonuses before the inevitable collapse of...

The class bias in government policy is clear in the decision to release a small amount of foodgrain in the open market to tackle inflation. MOST people would agree that there is a strong element of speculation underlying the current inflation and that forward trading contributes to it. Yet the government, though it has banned forward trading in certain commodities under public pressure, is curiously reluctant to see this point....

Four public-funded national universities have entered into a "confidential" pact with Nestle, one of the biggest baby food and commercial food companies, for nutrition awareness programmes for adolescent school-going girls in government-run village schools. Breastfeeding Promotion Network of India (BPNI) has written a letter to the secretary for school education and literacy, Anshu Vaish, protesting against "brand promotion using the public education system" and saying that the MoU (memorandum of understanding)...