Rich but Hungry

Sarkozy also once promised to help dismantle Europe's farm subsidies; now the French are talking about blocking imports, which underscores Western hypocrisy around agriculture, and the rise of the developing world.

Paradoxically, those higher food bills share a common cause with the previous prosperity of the developed world. In recent years, cheap imports of all sorts of products from China and India have helped to restrain inflation in rich countries. Now the very success of the booming Eastern economies is helping to drive up prices, as consumers raise their spending on food and develop Western tastes. "We always used to talk about these countries' positive effect on inflation through the supply side: now we are beginning to see the negative effect on the demand side," says Hans Martens, at the European Policy Centre, a Brussels-based think tank.

Even as price controls exacerbated rather than alleviated food inflation in the 1970s, it's unlikely knee-jerk protectionist policies being contemplated around the world today will help matters. "Governments really have very few levers that they can pull," says Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University in London. Politicians would do better to contemplate free trade and investment into agricultural productivity than new ways to manipulate the market. Pasta may be easy to fix, but its price is not.

With Barbara Kantrowitz in London, Tracy Mcnicoll in Paris and Barbie Nadeau in Rome

© 2008