🌾 Food Prices

Background: why this matters

Food is where many global shocks end up. Wars, droughts, energy spikes and pandemics all eventually reach dinner tables through the price of staples, and the poorest households, which spend the largest share of their income on food, feel it first. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization's Food Price Index tracks international prices of a basket of commodities (cereals, vegetable oils, dairy, meat and sugar) relative to their 2014–2016 average.

Big price spikes have repeatedly coincided with unrest. In 2007–08, sharp rises in grain prices were followed by food riots in dozens of countries. Prices spiked again in 2010–11, the period of the Arab Spring uprisings; researchers at the New England Complex Systems Institute found that bursts of food riots clustered around those peaks. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 (both countries are major exporters of wheat, maize and sunflower oil), the index hit its all-time high in March 2022. The UN-brokered Black Sea Grain Initiative then helped reopen Ukrainian exports until mid-2023.

Food also matters in the most extreme scenarios on this site. Studies of 'abrupt sunlight reduction' events, such as a nuclear war or a large volcanic eruption that blocks sunlight, find that most deaths would come through crop failure and famine, not the event itself (Xia et al., Nature Food, 2022). A resilient, well-stocked global food system is humanity's buffer against almost every other catastrophe.

The index measures world market prices in US dollars, not what people actually pay locally. Local prices also depend on exchange rates, subsidies, transport and conflict, which is why the Famine page tracks outcomes on the ground separately. The index is published monthly, usually in the first week of the month.

What analysts watch: harvest forecasts and weather in major breadbaskets; El Niño and La Niña; export bans (such as India's rice export restrictions of 2023); fertiliser and energy costs; shipping disruption; and stocks of grain relative to use.