Oral question asked in the House of Lords, by Earl of Onslow (Conservative). It was answered on Tuesday, 25 March 2008.

Food: Grain Stocks

Question: My Lords, is it not worth considering the following calculation? If every Chinaman eats one more chicken a year and it takes something like 10 pounds of grain to produce one chicken, that 10 pounds multiplied by 1.3 billion people is an awful lot of grain. Does that very simply not show why there is a terrible pressure on the grain market?

Answer: My Lords, yes, and indeed those calculations have been done. If you then combine them with two bad harvests in both Europe and Australia, you get the doubling of prices which we have seen in the past year. Those have not all come through in food prices at the retail end of the market; there are still quite a few more. At present, the world stocks of wheat are at less than 70 days of consumption and the world stocks of maize are at less than 50 days of consumption. A lot of people around the world are looking at these figures in order to form a plan to deal with the issue.

Secondary information