Four Food Price Crises Compared: 1973-74, 2007-08, 2010-12 and 2022

Published September 25, 2026 · Updated October 5, 2026 · 4 min read

Four times in the last fifty years, world grain prices have doubled or more within a year or two. Each crisis had its own trigger, but the same ingredients keep coming back: thin stocks, expensive energy, bad weather in a key exporter, and export restrictions by governments seeking to secure domestic supply, which push prices up elsewhere. The figures below are World Bank monthly prices; on the wheat, corn and rice charts, event markers flag 2007-08, 2012 and 2022 (switch the time range to Max to see the 1970s).

1972-74: the Soviet purchases and the first oil shock

After a poor harvest in 1972, the Soviet Union bought large quantities of grain on the world market, much of it from the United States, and drew down stocks that had kept prices calm for years. The 1973 oil shock then raised the cost of fuel and fertilizer, the dollar weakened after the end of fixed exchange rates, and the collapse of Peru's anchovy catch during the 1972-73 El Niño cut the supply of fish meal for animal feed. Wheat rose from about 60 dollars per tonne in January 1972 to 220 dollars in February 1974; rice from about 112 to 604 dollars.

2007-08: biofuels, drought and export bans

This time demand played a bigger role: US ethanol production was absorbing a growing share of the corn crop, oil prices were at record highs, and a multi-year drought had cut Australia's wheat harvests just as global stocks were low. What turned a steep rise into a panic were export restrictions - India, Vietnam and other exporters limited rice sales abroad to protect their own consumers. Rice climbed from about 313 dollars per tonne in January 2007 to 907 dollars in April 2008, and wheat from about 196 to 440 dollars. Economists Will Martin and Kym Anderson later estimated that such insulating policies explained nearly half of the rise in the world rice price in that period. Protests over food prices broke out in dozens of countries.

2010-12: Russia's drought, then America's

A severe drought in 2010 led Russia to ban grain exports from August of that year. Wheat rose from about 158 dollars per tonne in June 2010 to 355 dollars in May 2011, and the FAO Food Price Index reached what was then a record in early 2011. Before the market had fully recovered, the 2012 drought in the US Midwest pushed corn to about 333 dollars per tonne in July 2012.

2021-22: pandemic recovery, energy and war

Demand recovered quickly after the pandemic, drought hit South American crops in 2021, and energy and fertilizer prices surged. Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 then disrupted two of the world's largest grain exporters, and India banned wheat exports in May 2022. Wheat rose from about 273 dollars per tonne in March 2021 to 522 dollars in May 2022 - the highest monthly price in the World Bank series in nominal terms.

What inflation changes - and what the crises had in common

Measured in today's money, the picture looks different. Converted with the US consumer price index to August 2026 dollars, the 1974 wheat peak comes to roughly 1,565 dollars per tonne, the 2008 peak to about 690 and the 2022 peak to about 600. The 1970s crisis was by far the most severe; the chart setting "inflation-adjusted" shows this for any commodity. What all four had in common: low stocks-to-use ratios left no buffer, energy costs rose at the same time, and export restrictions spread from one country to the next. And each time, high prices encouraged more planting and less use, and prices fell back within a few years - never to where they started, but far below the peak.