I am indebted to a couple of correspondents to the Daily Telegraph for the following.
They were responding to reports of unprecedented increases in food prices. Catherine Spencer of Warminster, Wilts, who is an egg producer, said she had watched free range egg prices in supermarkets rise by 83p/doz over the last twelve months. As a producer of free range eggs she had only received an extra 16p/doz over the same period. She wondered what had happened to the 67p difference.
Dr Kieth Ray of Marlow in Buckinghamshire pointed out that while the price of a loaf of bread had increased by 15% because, according to retailers, "the price of wheat has doubled". But Dr Ray, who has spent 30 years in the food industry and knows how much wheat is used to make a loaf, calculated that a doubling in the price of wheat equated to around 7%, not 15%.
He too suggested that someone in the production and marketing chain was taking advantage of current headlines about food shortages and higher commodity prices to make a lot of money.
Who could that possibly be?