Have the prices gone up at your local supermarket recently? Maybe your favorite chocolate is suddenly a lot more expensive? Do you wonder why? You may not think much about it, but the bigger picture that lays behind  is grim-looking, to say the least: Cocoa trading at a one-year high, coffee trading a 13-year high, sugar trading at a 30-year high…ouch! I didn’t know there were such fluctuations in the raw material prices of the staples that go into so many of today’s foods, and if these prices continue to go up, that will definitely feed through the entire food supply chain, let alone the economy. Is cheap food and cheap energy perhaps a thing of the past and a time gone by?

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