Food prices soaring

AS WE predicted five weeks ago (See a Week in the Country, 02/11/07) food prices are soaring faster than at any time for 14 years, the Office for National Statistics admitted yesterday.

Although some of the increase is due to the rising price of dairy products now that the major supermarkets have been shamed into paying farmers a reasonable price for their milk, (See News) most of the increase is due to the increased cost of wheat imports and big jumps in the price of diesel fuel for transport, gas and electricity.

The ONS survey shows that the price boom is the fastest since 1993, with raw material costs up 6.6% up on last year. One of the main reasons for this is that wheat supplies from North and South America have been hit by bad harvests and millions of acres of former wheat-growing land are being switched to bio-fuel production.

All these problems have been predicted in our columns over the past two years but they seem to have taken the Government by surprise as support for British farming has been progressively reduced.

The food increases, added to hikes in the cost of utilities, fuel and mortgage payments, promise a tough New Year in 2008 for Prime Minister Gordon Brown, already embattled in a series of scandals.

But as one Yorkshire Dales farming expert told Daelnet today: "This crunch on food prices has been coming for several years but no-one in Government believed it would happen. They have continued to downgrade the importance of local food production at a time when they should have been encouraging it."