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If you ask a metrologist you will get this answer. But from what I’ve heard from eu farmers are: Russian fertilisers and gas dependence have caused quite a blow to the market, it will need time to normalise.
Not trying to downplay extreme weather though!
That's part of the equation for sure but extreme weather events have a massive impact where I live. Talking to producers, they are losing way more of their production way more frequently due to intense rain or dry events. As an exemple, someone who manages orchards was telling me that the norm now is to lose 1 year of harvest every 5 years when it was every 10 years 20 years ago.
Talking with small scale organic veg growers who are less dependent on russian oil, managing weather events is the hardest part of their job. Currently, the soil is as dry as it usually is end of august where i am.
> the norm now is to lose 1 year of harvest every 5 years when it was every 10 years 20 years ago.
That sounds apocalyptic given that these things have only just begun.
Where do you live? Rain and dry has not become more intense in most parts of the world, so local climate change of that sort isn't driven by CO2. For example, in the UK rainfall levels haven't changed since recordings began, there's no increase in outlier events either.
A doubling of crop failure rates in just 20 years is definitely not something that should be immediately blamed on global climate change. It's possible there's some local climate change for non-CO2 reasons. In 20 years there's been just 0.2 degrees of average warming, which is barely detectable (CIs on weather stations are often much larger!)
A metrologist is a person who studies and practices the science of measurement.
Climate change will cause more wars also.
I see the war in Ukraine as one of them. They have huge areas of farm land, valuable in times where climate change makes farming impossible in other regions. And many big companies and countries are already invested in there. You can already see how dependent some countries are on this base on the different price spikes. (While the question remains if farm products should be traded on stock markets).
We should not rely on gas for producing mineral fertilizers: https://www.carbonbrief.org/fertiliser-emissions-could-be-cu...
Should == I wish.
In the little corner of Europe where I live food became more noticeably expensive with the Ukraine war. Not everything but a number of items. At one point, the price of olive oil was raised because vegetable oil had to be cheaper than olive oil!
Evidence? Olive oil got more expensive because of weather extremes https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20231218-why-olive-oil-pr... . Who sets the rule that one oil must be cheaper than the other? Which country? Which type of olive oil?
Ukraine is the largest exporter of sunflower oil with Russia being #2. They are still #1 as of 2023 [1] so the war appears not to have completely interrupted supply but may have made it more expensive to distribute. WSJ reports that the war's effect on sunflower oil is causing a rise in price of all cooking oils.
[1] - https://oec.world/en/profile/hs/sunflower-seed-or-safflower-... [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rtWDmo0rKg
We're talking about mainly 4 countries in the Mediterranean Sea.
The way I see it is that while it's true that there is an issue with the weather, they increased the prices in 2022 due to old high-demand/low-offer law (other cheaper oil not available, buy whatever is there: olive oil). The prices never decreased though, or if they did, it's unnoticeable. This pattern I have seen multiple times in my life: once companies realize people are going to pay for something for a certain price, why reduce it?
Portugal. You would have to live here I guess. It was about 2 years ago and I don't have any sources to give you. Ask the locals if you know any.
Olive oil may be more expensive in general now because of poor harvests but at the time local production had been good and there was no reason to raise the price. The rationale? I guess it was profit.
have you been on the grounds of the olive oil producers? they had to increase prices because crisis talk and civil conflicts increased prices elsewhere. even unrelated prices cause increases up the graphs in all directions. it's mostly lies, of course, but they catch up.
don't take my word on it, obviously, but the math checks out "if you follow the money". essentially, logistical cost increases as well as oil and insurance prices were the determining factors, not extreme weather. despite zero change in the scarcity of any of the factors. (they found more oil etc)
crisis talk was also the reason for increased demand in some countries as idiots started to stock up and panic buy. I remember buying flour at a local producer and she said "they are all fucking crazy, nothing changes". the Russians were still stuck for days in front of the border in a long convoy, wahahaha, according to the news.
Can confirm this. I think it was sunflower oil which went through the roof when war started not vegetable though.
As well as rapeseed oil. Here in Germany it reached the prices of olive oil, which was insane.
Olive Groves were hit by Xylella fastidiosa.
The UN previewed a report yesterday on food price rises 2020-24 https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/07/1165468
Cherries, Apricots, and Peaches produced no fruit this year in the Balkans (and possibly elsewhere in Europe), due to an early winter warm followed by a frost that destroyed all blooms. That will likely impact a lot of european canning and food producers.
Meanwhile we're getting bumper cherry harvests in the UK
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/cherries-tes...
We will see much more of this. Consequences of climate change start to really ramp up. We have been seeing temperature records year after year way beyond expectations. It’s coming fast and it is happening now, not just affecting our children and grandchildren. Recommend the „time is up“ talks from Mark Benecke (most are in German, subtitles and looking at the graphs should give you the gist though).
Yep, but don't forget to blame immigrants for causing these issues. That's really what's at the heart of this.
Of course. And don’t look up. I’m always amazed at how good we humans are at denying reality.
The fed pumps out tons of data:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/categories
What is particularly interesting is the spike in prices of beef. If climate extremes are causing food price shocks one would think that the beef price spike is caused by feed price shocks.
Feed prices are down at 2019 levels. And most cattle farmers are bitching that their wholesale prices are down. The fed data here seems to be MOSTLY from the processors and only some of it (the data with lower prices) from the larger market.
I dont doubt that there are shocks to the market, but it looks like there is a lot of gouging going on that is a hang over from the pandemic.
> What is particularly interesting is the spike in prices of beef. If climate extremes are causing food price shocks one would think that the beef price spike is caused by feed price shocks.
This is specious reasoning because the cost of goods sold for beef involves more than just feed. Labor prices, especially at the low end which meat processors typically pay, have increased.
The largest publicly listed beef processors are reporting very low single digit profit margins (as do grocery stores) :
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSN/tyson-foods/pr...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/JBSAY/jbs-sa/profi...
It is reasonable to assume Cargill and National Beef are in the same boat (since processing beef does not involve some secret technology that would give them a leg up).
It's energy plus food. Fertiliser is made from gas (generally) so there's a double hit. First feed prices go up, then fertiliser prices go up, then beef prices go up.
We really (as a species) need to get off oil based stuff if we want to reduce inflation over the longer term (and for all the other climate based reasons too).
I do not understand all the relativations here: If we crash the climate, we destroy the foundations for living on this planet, at least for most of us (billions). Sure, the current question is why we suddenly have none for weapons and even mightier AI while this would better be spend to get away from fossil fuels.
Weapons and AI make more money in the short to medium term. We have no direction other than where the market guides us, even if that's towards death
I wonder if more and more food production will shift to giant, climate-controlled greenhouses?
Where I’m from we get fresh locally produced tomatoes and cucumbers in winter, although it’s freezing outside. It seems like an obvious band-aid if food prices rise enough to make it economical for more crops.
Lack of water and extreme weather events (hurricanes, landslides, strong floods, long droughts, heat, cold) will play a major role in the future. Locations/facilities that protect from these problems will be desired and fought for. War and crime probably will also be an issue, as such locations are sparse compared to how much we need to feed the world.
I think importing from warm countries will continue to be economically better
Over here yield is extremely variable. For fruit, last year was extremely poor due to a late (one night) freeze that killed of all the flowers and buds. This year, biggest bumper crop I have ever witnessed.
I started farming 15 years ago. It is mind boggling how much yields have jumped since I began. What was once cause for celebration is now considered failure. Some of that is attributable to improved technology, to be sure, but it mainly seems to be a result of climate change.
Interesting that this is happening in concert with "a persistent and widespread increase of growing season integrated LAI (greening) over 25% to 50% of the global vegetated area, whereas less than 4% of the globe shows decreasing LAI (browning)."
The paper suggests "CO2 fertilization effects explain most of the greening trends in the tropics, whereas climate change resulted in greening of the high latitudes and the Tibetan Plateau. LCC contributed most to the regional greening observed in southeast China and the eastern United States. "
I'd be damn leery here of assigning such an explanation for global food prices to such an ambiguous connection, when plenty of interconnected geopolitical factors offer lots of causes of their own. Promoting good climate science isn't helped by shoehorning it as a cause for anything that most people don't like unless your evidence is damn good.
Makes you wonder if these climate-driven food shocks would have happened if COVID/ZIRP ending hadn't ...
Are there any comparable periods of weather extremes resulting in such widespread price hikes?
There was a price shock following the 2013 derecho that ravaged the US breadbasket.
But the 2020s shock was far more shocking because of the triple whammy. It started with the 2019 derecho again ravaging the US breadbasket much like in 2013, but continued with EU fertilizer plant shutdowns, soon followed by Russia attacking Ukraine — which also cut off access to Russian fertilizer and constrained access to Ukraine food production. COVID/ZIRP might have also played into it, but there isn't much to suggest it was a significant factor.
We need to stop relying on the sun for our food security.
It’s just inflation to be honest.
olive oil price is back down now, but the biggest problem with it is expensive workers , as it is labor intensive, and despite the inflow of illegal immigrants to south europe.
>despite the inflow of illegal immigrants to south europe
Why "despite"? How many people who move illegally to Europe want to go work hard labor on farms if they can have easier avenues of making money?
From what I read in newspapers, most farm workers at least in DACH region tend to be Romanians, which are EU citizens, and in Scandinavia they tend to be Asians on legal work visas, basically all legal workers who wanted those jobs from the get go.
So you can't fix the Europe's famously perpetual "muh (cheap) labor shortage" with open borders to illegals, if those people don't want those jobs to begin with. That's like leaving your house front door wide open, hoping that from all those people who walk in, someone might want to be your maid for cheap, and not just eat your food and walk out.