Food prices may decline next year as demand slows, output rises

Inflation-adjusted prices may ease before staying largely flat through 2030, the United Nations and Organisation for Economic Co-operation Development said in a report.

Consumers may get some respite from surging food prices in the coming years as demand growth slows and output rises, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and United Nations. A gauge of global food costs has jumped to a nine-year high on the back of huge Chinese demand and weather concerns, squeezing consumer budgets hurt by the Covid-19 crisis. But in the next couple of years, inflation-adjusted prices may ease before staying largely flat through 2030 as demand growth for grains and fish slows and farming supplies rise, the OECD and UN said in a report. “The fundamentals don’t say to us that we’re moving to a super-cycle of commodity prices,” Maximo Torero, chief economist of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, said at a webinar Monday. “Demand growth is going to decrease.”