The banana republics created were quite awful, no question there. But current government subsidies are there so that we don't see worse food shortages during t

The banana republics created were quite awful, no question there. But current government subsidies are there so that we don't see worse food shortages during times when food production is disrupted. Say, some guy far away declaring war on an area that produces a significant fraction of the wheat in the world, or some country that sells a lot of fertilizer and/or oil not selling it so much any more for whatever reason. Yes, they're anti-competitive, but they have a pretty good reason to exist in countries that might frequently get into wars, since they would leave a pretty big vulnerability otherwise. Also, a lot of the food production is sold via futures to stabilize prices and to offset the huge costs of producing it that aren't recouped until months later, but the futures + inflation are kinda working against the producers right now, especially when combined with fuel & fertilizer costs going crazy. I'm not sure about your assertion that supermarkets have so little to do with the prices, they may not take that big a cut overall, but that really depends on how careful you are shopping given that there are plenty of products where you can pay significantly different prices for similar goods. I do agree that it's probably not responsible for most of the worrying increases, but you do still have to mind your loyalty cards and whatnot. I think that in large part, prices are going up due to inflation, global shipping issues, disruption of large areas of farmland, energy costs and lack of fertilizer. And those last two are related due to the Haber-Bosch process for producing fertilizer, fuel is not just for shipping or powering farm machinery. There are plenty of issues, and plenty of reason to worry about how harvests go this year, but I do agree that my worry would be more about the production side, and whether farmers can plant enough, not just the distribution side. Things are probably going to get worse unless we have really great harvests this year, in my view. The time to deal with many of these problems was months ago, before planting started, but the second best time is now.