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ULAN BATOR, Mongolia (AP) -- More than 20,000 people flooded the center of Mongolia's capital Friday to demand that the government do something about rising food prices that have nearly tripled in some cases.

Holding banners saying "Stop inflated food prices" and "Let the salaries of the working class increase," the protesters marched peacefully to demand that prices for rice, meat and flour be stabilized.

Read more:
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080418/mongolia_inflation_protest.html

Rioting in response to soaring food prices recently has broken out in Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Ethiopia. In Pakistan and Thailand, army troops have been deployed to deter food theft from fields and warehouses. World Bank President Robert Zoellick warned in a recent speech that 33 countries are at risk of social upheaval because of rising food prices. Those could include Indonesia, Yemen, Ghana, Uzbekistan and the Philippines. In countries where buying food requires half to three-quarters of a poor person's income, "there is no margin for survival," he said.

April 12 (Bloomberg) -- Further gains in food prices would be ``terrible'' for the world's poor and throw hundreds of thousands of them into starvation, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said.

FakeBen says: "Wow! This is bad. This shows how crazy this situation is getting. Government are negotiating secret grain deals?"

Governments are racing to strike secretive barter and bilateral agreements with food-exporting countries to secure scarce supplies as the price of agricultural commodities jump to record highs, diplomats and cereal traders say.

The moves coincide with a significant tightening of the global food market as leading exporters of agricultural commodities ban foreign sales. The government-to-government contracts could bypass those restrictions, diplomats say.

TOKYO (AFP) - Japan's wholesale inflation rate hit a fresh 27-year high of 3.9 percent in March as companies struggled to cope with soaring raw material and energy costs, a report from the central bank showed.

Producer price inflation accelerated from a revised annual rate of 3.6 percent in February, the Bank of Japan said. It was the strongest rise in corporate goods prices since February 1981.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080411/bs_afp/japaneconomywholesaleinflati...

Wage settlements began to creep up this month, suggesting inflationary pressures are feeding through to pay packets.

The median level of pay settlements during the first three months of this year was 3.5 per cent, continuing the trend of modest rises at the end of last year, according to Incomes Data Services pay and benefits analysts.

However, pay reviews this month "are resulting in higher increases", IDS says.

It's pretty hard for Croesus to believe that the rate of inflation is only 3.4%, given the sharp rise in the price of food, gasoline and other sundry daily necessities.

Kimberly Stevens, a 42-year-old resident of Lewisville, Texas, and a Croesus follower, is also refusing to buy into the official Washington line that the nation's inflation rate is only 3.4%. This outraged reader says, "As far as I am concerned, Bernanke, President Bush, Clinton, Obama and the rest of them live in a fairy-tale world. They do not go shopping each week and have no idea what the cost of goods is."

Spot potash is heading for $500-$600
By Tom Stundza -- Purchasing, 4/9/2008 12:50:00 PM

Prices of fertilizer-related minerals (potash and sulphur) have risen to new heights, says chief industry and commodity economist Patricia Mohr at Scotiabank Group in Toronto. She points out that potash prices at the Port of Vancouver in British Columbia “have jumped from record to record, climbing from US$316 per metric ton in January to $394 in February to $412.50 in March — up 129.2% year-over-year.”

With the US Dollar still relatively weak against the majors, there are concerns that import price inflation will rise significantly...This topic may come to the forefront on Friday as the US import price index is expected to have risen 2.0 percent in March from the month prior while the index is also forecasted to have surged a whopping 13.7 percent from a year earlier.

http://www.dailyfx.com/story/dailyfx_reports/cross_markets_data_reaction...

FakeBen says: "So you don't think workers around the world are going to be asking for raises? Once this cycle gets started, it's hard to stop. The Fed is not being cautious enough here."

PARIS (AFP) - A resurgence in worldwide inflation in the past several months has been principally powered by rises in the price of food and energy, exacerbated by galloping demand in fast-growing emerging market countries...