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There's something interesting going on in today's ONS data on food price inflation - thread
Overall food inflation is down a little, but still above 18% - a big factor in the cost of living. And some items have gone up way more than that:
Top inflating food item is sugar, up 50% in the last year. Why? One factor is heavy rains in Maharashtra, India, which has cut production bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Maharashtra being a part of India where heavy rain has increased 3x since the 1950s as the region has warmed nature.com/articles/s4146…
The second-top riser is olive oil, which has gone up 47%. That's being blamed on drought in the Mediterranean, which has slashed production, especially in Spain investmentmonitor.ai/features/olive…
Climate change made that drought more likely, an attribution study found, and the recent extreme heat in Spain would have been almost impossible without the effects of fossil fuel use worldweatherattribution.org/extreme-april-… worldweatherattribution.org/wp-content/upl…
Not broken-out in the ONS data, but risotto rice prices are up because of the same Mediterranean drought that was attributed to climate change, specifically in the Po valley in Italy euronews.com/2022/08/05/po-…
Pasta and couscous are interesting: up 28% in the last year, nearly 40% since late 2021 ons.gov.uk/economy/inflat…
That's due to a big increase in durum wheat prices, after 2021 drought in Canada, the main producer of pasta wheat foodmatterslive.com/article/price-…
Durum wheat prices are starting to fall now, so I guess pasta prices should start to come down soon - 2 years after the drought teseo.clal.it/en/?section=fr…
The killer heatwave in western Canada and the US in 2021 would have been virtually impossible without climate change, another attribution study found worldweatherattribution.org/western-north-…
This is systematic, not just isolated examples. Last year ECIU found climate change was responsible for £170/yr increase in food bills, 37% of the total increase in food costs eciu.net/media/press-re…
A European Central Bank study found that last summer's heat in Europe alone pushed up food inflation 0.67% and headline inflation 0.34% ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpwps…
Obviously Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and its effects on energy and fertiliser prices, plus high oil and gas prices, are also massive factors
But hard to avoid the conclusion that climate change is now pushing up food prices and overall inflation - and interest rates - in the UK and elsewhere
Surprised how little attention this has had /end
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