http://www.bigpictureagriculture.com
In that blog, you can see the reasons why the prices of both basic agricultural commodities were skyrocketing.
[...] the price of wheat rose more than 50 percent from mid-June until its peak in mid-July. By now everyone knows that the global corn and soybean market was greatly affected by our Midwestern drought. The spring wheat crop was good, however, and even though the U.S. produces only 10 percent of the world’s wheat, it is the largest wheat exporter. It was reassuring that throughout this drought season, we knew that global wheat and rice stocks were very ample and much above the levels of the food crisis year 2007/08. So, why did the price of wheat go up so much even though global wheat stocks were 42 percent higher than in 2007/08? In part, it looks like it over-reacted.
One reason was poor weather in some of the other wheat exporting nations. There was too much rain in some of Europe and a lack of rain in Russia, the Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. Russia is the world’s third largest wheat exporter and its yields fell 31 percent from last year, according to CME group. (Why hasn’t Paul Krugman chimed in this time, or has he noticed? Fact is, there are frequent droughts in this region.) Some expect Russia’s available wheat for export will be gone by the end of the year, as producers there have been exporting rapidly in case export restrictions are instated. Spain’s production was down 30 percent due to drought. There is some worry about the next growing season, too. There are dry conditions in Western Australia, the world’s second largest wheat exporter after North America. There are also dry soil conditions in the hard red winter wheat growing region in the U.S., lessened, however, by very recent rains.
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