Can technology feed the world’s population?

Wheat and rice, on the other hand, are dietary grains that are used for food. Some people conflate these, but they are not the same, which creates confusion when discussing rising food costs and rising food prices.

For example, in 2008 it was widely reported that the price of rice had gone up by 300 per cent, and that rice, typically sold at $200 or $250 per metric tonne, had soared to more than $1,000.

To the uninformed that sounds like rice went up by a factor of four. It does to me. Wouldn’t it to you? What was underreported was that the amount of rice that is traded globally is only about six or seven per cent of the total rice crop.

So 90 plus per cent of the rice crop was grown and distributed and sold for $250 per metric ton. But if you had to buy it on the open market, in some cases you were looking at $700 to $900.

So for whom did the price of that grain go up for? Was it for a few, say, five per cent of the market, or was it for 95 per cent of the market? And when it came to food, if you were trying to eat rice at $1,000 a metric tonne, that was a very different outcome than the many, many millions of people who grow their regular rice crop the way they normally do and consume it locally. Nothing changed for them.

Where I’m headed with all this is that there’s nothing simple about food costs, because depending on who you’re talking about, and whether you’re talking about grain or whether you’re talking about food and who consumes it, (it) tends to have a different story behind it. There are a few generalisations one can make.

Adapted from Chief Executive Magazine