Over the past few years, we have seen food prices in the United States and other wealthy countries do things that they have never done before.  Unfortunately, this is just the beginning.  Global food supplies are getting tighter, and meanwhile global demand for food just continues to increase.  For decades, many among the elite were optimistic that someday we would be able to eliminate global hunger completely because tremendous progress was being made.  But then right around 2015 things started to reverse, and now the trend is very much going in the wrong direction.  According to the United Nations, 2.4 billion people did not have enough food to eat last year, and 900 million of them were facing severe food insecurity.  Those numbers will almost certainly go even higher this year, because it is getting more difficult for poor countries to get the food that they need to feed their populations.

For example, just consider what is happening to rice prices.

Rice is a core staple for billions of people around the globe, and India is the most important exporter of rice by a very wide margin…

More than half of the rice imports in around 42 countries originate from India, and in many African nations, India’s market share in rice imports surpasses 80%, according to Ifpri.

In top consuming countries in Asia – Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka, for example – the share of rice consumption in total calorie intake a day ranges from 40% to 67%.

Now that India has severely restricted rice exports, what are those nations going to do?

According to the BBC, India’s export ban “has sparked worries about runaway global rice prices”…

Indica white rice dominates around 70% of the global trade, and India has now ceased its export. This comes on top of the country’s ban last year of exports of broken rice and a 20% duty on non-basmati rice exports.

Not surprisingly, July’s export ban has sparked worries about runaway global rice prices.

Sadly, this is already starting to happen.

In fact, the price of Thai white rice is already “up over 50% since the start of 2022”…

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