Is your grocery bill going up? You're not alone

“The market is extremely nervous. With the slightest news about bad weather, the market reacts,” said economist Abbassian.

That means that a drought in Australia and flooding in Argentina, two of the world’s largest suppliers of industrial milk and butter, sent the price of butter in France soaring 37 percent from 2006 to 2007.

Forty percent of escargot, the snail dish, is butter.

“You can do the calculation yourself,” said Romain Chapron, president of Croque Bourgogne, which supplies escargot. “It had a considerable effect. It forced people in our profession to tighten their belts to the maximum.”

The same climate crises sparked a 21 percent rise in the cost of milk, which with butter makes another famous French food item — the croissant. Panavi, a pastry and bread supplier, has raised retail prices of croissants and pain au chocolat by 6 to 15 percent.

Already, there’s a lot of suspicion among consumers.

“They don’t understand why prices have gone up like this,” said Nicole Watelet, general secretary at the Federation of French Bakeries and Pastry Enterprises. “They think that someone is profiting from this. But it’s not us. We’re paying.”   Food costs worldwide spiked 23 percent from 2006 to 2007, according to the FAO. Grains went up 42 percent, oils 50 percent and dairy 80 percent.

Economists say that for the short term, government bailouts will have to be part of the answer to keep unrest at a minimum. In recent weeks, rising food prices sparked riots in the West African nations of Burkina Faso, where mobs torched buildings, and Cameroon, where at least four people died.

But attempts to control prices in one country often have dire effects elsewhere. China’s restrictions on wheat flour exports resulted in a price spike in Indonesia this year, according to the FAO. Ukraine and Russia imposed export restrictions on wheat, causing tight supplies and higher prices for importing countries. Partly because of the cost of imported wheat, Peru’s military has begun eating bread made from potato flour, a native crop.

“We need a response on a large scale, either the regional or international level,” said Brian Halweil of the environmental research organization Worldwatch Institute. “All countries are tied enough to the world food markets that this is a global crisis.”

Poorer countries can speed up the adjustment by investing in agriculture, experts say. If they do, farmers can turn high prices into an engine for growth.

But in countries like Burkina Faso, the crisis is immediate.

Days after the riots, Pascaline Ouédraogo wandered the market in the capital, Ouagadougou, looking to buy meat and vegetables. She said a good meal cost 1,000 francs (about $2.35) not long ago. Now she needs twice that.

“The more prices go up, the less there is to meet their needs,” she said of her three children, all in secondary school. “You wonder if it’s the government or the businesses that are behind the price hikes.”

Irène Belem, a 25-year-old with twins, struggles to buy milk, which has gone up 57 percent in recent weeks.

“We knew we were poor before,” she said, “but now it’s worse than poverty.”

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