When I was studying agricultural science 20-odd years ago, much intellectual effort was being spent on how to reduce mountains – butter mountains, beef mountains, and wine lakes (just for variety).
What’s slipped by almost unnoticed is that the butter mountain has now officially gone – not melted, but eaten. And the price of wholesale milk has doubled worldwide.
The continuing drought in Australia, which has crippled the country’s dairy output, has raised the wholesale price of skimmed milk powder by 60 per cent in six months. Over the past year, the cost of skimmed milk powder, used widely by the food processing industry, has soared from $2,000 per tonne to $4,800 per tonne. Butter is also becoming much dearer, rising from $1,800 per tonne to $2,550 per tonne, according to figures from the Milk Development Council.
Putting this together with the weather news from America – long-term catastrophic drought – and you wonder just what are the levels of the world food supplies? And what are the prices likely to be like if, say, Europe were to have a really bad summer?
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