There is widespread agreement that biofuels expansion worldwide was a major
contributor to the increases in agricultural commodity prices, through the direct diversion
of food and feed crops to fuel uses and through the competition for land to grow energyrelated
crops. There is less agreement on what share of the food price increases should be
attributed to biofuels expansion. Other significant factors include: rising oil prices;
financial speculation (widely cited as contributing to the two price spikes); expanding
demand for meat-based diets (and the feed grains to support them) in large developing
countries such as China; crop losses due to extreme weather events, possibly related to
changing climate patterns; low levels of inventories of key food crops, and very low
publicly held reserves; border measures during the crisis that exacerbated price increases;
trade policies that had, over time, weakened developing countries’ food-production
capacity; a long-run slowdown in yield increases for key food crops, in part due to