IF CONSUMERS are unhappy about food prices now, they won't like what's coming.
Population rises are just one of a range of factors listed by economist Professor Claudio Malagoli as contributing to an ongoing escalation in food prices - although not necessarily with any price benefit to farmers locked into a system geared only for pushing down prices.
By 2020, just a decade away, the world's population could be approaching eight billion.In 2007, for the first time, most of the world's population was to be found in cities. This creates issues with the energy costs of distribution, with food losses and wastage in preparation, and with the disposal of food packaging, all of which have a bearing on price.Climate change is already producing unprecedented climatic adversity around the world, reducing the reliability of farming.Growing desire for meat protein that is met by intensive feeding, and a push toward biofuels, is increasing the amount of cropland harvested for reasons that don't directly meet human nutritional needs. A calorie of energy from animal protein takes eight calories of energy of vegetable origin to produce, the professor said.Farmland is being irreparably being paved over with cities, highways and other infrastructure. Cities were always located in areas of prime fertility, which means the world's best farmland is being lost.Today's farming methods are dependent on fossil fuels, a resource apparently in rapid decline.Land-poor countries like China and some of the Middle Eastern States are securing large tracts of farmland in other countries, including Australia, compromising the future food sovereignty of those countries.Because of the inequity of wealth across the planet, continued price rises on globally-traded food just push food out of reach of the world's poor. About a billion people are now estimated to be chronically malnourished, 60 per cent of them women and children. 
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