Now It’s the $6 Loaf of Bread

In the afternoons, Ringo Purganan, a 20-year-old who is training to be a cook, pedals his bicycle home through the densely populated barrio of Krus na Ligas in Quezon City, outside Manila. His mother usually leaves some bread and fruit juice for him to snack on before he returns to work. (Article continued below...)

But today, the kitchen is empty save a plastic container half-filled with rice grains. His daily earnings of about $4.70, and the wages from his mother's

job washing dishes at a university canteen, can't buy enough food for his six-person family. With the price of rice having nearly tripled in recent months, the Purganans usually skip breakfast. "It can be hard to accept things as they are, but we survive," he says.

From the crowded warrens of Krus na Ligas to the aisles of the Wal-Mart in Las Cruces, N.M., the price of food has become an unavoidable topic of conversation. In January, the bull run of agricultural commodities was an afterthought at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where the subprime crisis, sovereign-wealth funds and the seemingly inexorable rise of petroleum dominated the agenda. But in a few short months, food has replaced oil as the Next Big Threat to the long-running global expansion. In the past year, wheat and corn futures have risen 61 percent and 58 percent, respectively. Rice futures have more than doubled since last August.

In the recent global boom—five years of synchronous growth that lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, forged new trading links and brought the hope of a better life to the developing world—the availability of plentiful, cheap food was generally taken for granted. But now much of the recent progress is being threatened by expensive food, whose advent has been a long time coming. As with oil, the rising prices are fueled in part by speculators. And like oil, expensive staples are swiftly upsetting business plans, sparking inflation, causing political instability and inflicting widespread economic pain.