I don’t think food prices are the cause, just the effect. That doesn’t mean watching food prices isn’t helpful, they are, it just means we need to look at the triggers of rising food prices.
You can lay this out on top of the world price of oil and it looks exactly the same. Food production depends on energy. More in some places and less in other places.
Droughts and floods also come into play. The 2010 spike on the graph was caused by the Russian drought and Putin stopping wheat exports.
Some nations have a lot of sustenance farming or labor intensive farming and they have chronic output problems that are made worse by having to import grains.
At the CIA world Factbook, under the economic section, a(all) nations labor supply is characterized and those nations in which a high proportion of the labor supply is in farming, will always have ag output problems. Mexico has been trying to privatize their huge system of ag collectives(Ejidos) since they signed NAFTA.
In the US, only a very small percentage work in ag but we have a lot of part time farmers with regular jobs.
Today there are 7 billion, 9 billion in 2050, and 11 billion in 2100.
Give me an order of those grasshoppers sauteed in garlic butter