Food inflation is what people care about

For years things like house prices and rents have been relentlessly rising, and people mostly shrug. For people in the USA, the cost of healthcare and education have been relentlessly rising, and people tend to accept it.

When petrol prices rise (as in 2007, 2014 and earlier this year), people shout, but the prices mostly come back down again.

What's different about the current crisis is that food inflation is rising for the first time in forty years, and people find it genuinely upsetting.

Here are the current food inflation rates around the world as of Oct 2022. Source: tradingeconomics.com

🇯🇵Japan, 6.2%
🇮🇩Indonesia, 6.7%
🇨🇳China, 7.0%
🇮🇳India, 7.01%
🇹🇭Thailand, 9.5%
🇨🇦Canada, 10.1%
🇳🇿New Zealand, 10.1%
🇺🇸United States, 10.9%
🇫🇷France, 12.0%
🇷🇺Russia, 12.1%
🇧🇪Belgium, 12.9%
🇹🇳Tunisia, 12.9%
🇳🇴Norway, 13.0%
🇦🇹Austria, 14.4%
🇩🇰Denmark, 15.7%
🇸🇪Sweden, 17.2%

The main culprit is the cost of fertilizer, especially fertilizer made from ammonia by-product of natural gas.

If you look at the list above, the rice eating nations are faring best. Because if you are short of chemical fertilizers, just introduce fish to your flooded paddy fields and they'll fertilize the fields for you, and you can havest the fish later as a second crop.