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But food is hardly in a class by itself when one bubble pops, the authorities immediately begin pumping up another one. After the Dot.Com Bubble deflated in 2000 2001, for example, up came even bigger bubbles in residential real estate and the finance industry.

Now, both housing and finance are losing air. But the central banks are still pumping hard. The air is apparently going straight into commodities.

In other words, worldwide inflation of food prices is a monetary phenomenon, as Milton Friedman might have put it, not an agricultural phenomenon.

To show you the scope of the phenomenon, we pull out a copy of The New York Times dated 19th October, 1896. There it is recorded in black and white that the average wheat price over the previous 20 years was about $1 a bushel the Dollar still being fully backed by and measured in Gold, of course.

So at that average price, one ounce of Gold would have bought you some 20 bushels of wheat between 1876 and the end of the 19th century. Whereas today, you can buy a bushel of wheat for about $12 (unbacked by gold) which means an ounce of Gold at current prices will buy around 75 bushels of wheat.

In terms of what used to pass for real money, therefore meaning Gold the price of wheat has gone down over the last 100 years. The price has only risen against the paper Dollar and its substitutes. So however quickly farmers have added to the world's wheat output, central banks have outdone them, planting far more acreage in paper money.

And now that governments have caused a crisis, they are hard at work making it worse.

In Argentina, the farmers are few city dwellers are many. Argentina's peronistas can do the maths. They make out the farmers historically patrician landowners with large holdings to be greedy and insensitive. The politicians imposed a 49% windfall tax on foreign sales. The measure should lower prices for Argentine consumers and raise money for the government, they reasoned. It seemed like a no brainer. That is, until the gauchos blocked the roads into Buenos Aires and threatened to starve the city.

In America, the maths is different...but the result is equally imbecilic. There aren't many farmers out on the prairie, but in Washington, there are more farm state US Senators than pigs. They push and shove up to the taxpayers' trough to get huge subsidies for their hometown campaign donors lately, in the form of bio fuels.

Corn fed ethanol may make no sense in environmental terms or energy terms, but it lubricates the big wheels of national politics. In the event, it takes a third of the US corn crop out of the food chain and puts it to use in the drive train further driving up grain prices.