food prices

The commonly used estimates of global wheat stocks are imperfect — some countries don’t publish data at all — but they indicate supplies, disrupted by the war in Ukraine, are the tightest since the food price crisis of 2007/08, said a blog by the IFPRI think tank.

The U.S. food inflation rate fell for the fifth month in a row to 10.1 percent for the past year, said the Labor Department on Tuesday. Food, the second-largest consumer expenditure after housing, was a factor in the persistently high U.S. inflation rate. USDA analysts estimate food prices will rise by 7.1 percent this year, the highest in three decades although a slowdown from 2022.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine fueled a sharp rise in food prices last winter, but prices have fallen for 10 straight months, said the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

The 9.9 percent food inflation rate of 2022 will be followed by a 7.1 percent rate this year, the highest rates in three decades, said USDA economists on Wednesday. Egg prices were forecast to rise 27 percent this year, on top of a 32 percent increase in 2022.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine drove food prices to record levels during 2022 and the Food Price Index remains elevated after a nine-month decline, said the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

Grocery prices will rise 3.5 percent in the new year, nearly double the long-term average but a dramatic slowdown from this year’s 11.5 percent, said the Agriculture Department Thursday in its Food Price Outlook.

The food inflation rate declined in November for the third month in a row to its lowest level since June, said the Labor Department on Tuesday. Despite the improvement, food prices are 10.6 percent higher than they were a year ago, according to the Consumer Price Index report.

Global food prices skyrocketed following the Russian invasion of Ukraine last February, but they have returned to earth, said the FAO Food Price Index, based on monthly changes in a basket of food commodities.

Turkey farmers and processors yelped over a farm group survey on Wednesday that said high turkey prices were driving up the cost of a home-cooked Thanksgiving dinner. “Turkeys and good deals are available!” said the National Turkey Federation in one of the few times the American Farm Bureau Federation has been challenged on its spot checks of holiday grocery prices.

Lower beef prices helped pull down the food inflation rate to an annualized 10.9 percent in October, the second month in a row of a decline, said the Labor Department in the Consumer Price Index report.

U.S. food prices are 11.2 percent higher than a year ago, modestly lower than the inflation rate of the previous month and ending a string of month-over-month increases dating from June 2021, said the government on Thursday.

Grocery prices will rise an average of 11 percent this year, the largest year-on-year increase since 1974, when prices soared by a torrid 14.9 percent, said the USDA. The monthly Food Price Outlook said grocery inflation would ebb to a near-normal 2.5 percent in 2023.

Scientists confirmed a backyard flock of poultry in northwestern Tennessee was infected with highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), part of a resurgence of the disease in the central states. Some 3.37 million birds in domestic flocks have died of bird flu so far this month; nationwide losses during September will be the largest since April.

Politically conservative Americans tend to overestimate and liberals to underestimate the annual inflation rate for food, according to a poll of 1,200 consumers by Purdue University. The difference in views is 3 to 4 percentage points, said Purdue researchers on Wednesday.

With the fall harvest getting under way, traders expect the USDA to trim its estimate of the U.S. corn crop by more than a quarter-billion bushels on Monday but to stick to its forecast of the largest soybean crop ever, at roughly 4.5 billion bushels. Dry weather in the western Corn Belt, including powerhouses Iowa and Nebraska, will lower corn production to just below 14.1 billion bushels, or 1 billion bushels less than last year, according to the average estimate from traders surveyed by wire services.

Biofuels are far more responsible for high vegetable oil prices than Russia's invasion of Ukraine, said agricultural economist Aaron Smith of UC-Davis, and the biofuel industry will drive up vegetable oil prices further. Ukraine and Russia produce more than half of the sunflower oil in the world but the oil accounts for only 10 percent of global production of vegetable oils.