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China’s opening to the world and economic reforms began in 1978 and resulted in remarkable economic growth. Food transition then occurred for part of Chinese citizens, meaning more meat consumption and less grain consumption. Many factors explained this transition. As China’s economy grew rapidly, peoples’ average income have been rising and cities have been growing at a rapid pace. Foreign investments in retail also have played a major role. But some gaps remain throughout the country: income inequality between rural and urban, between people living on the coast and in-land people, among generations. . . Food transition is not over yet for an important part of the Chinese population. China was able to feed its population until the beginning of the 21st century. But the imports of soybean and milk products have widened its food trade deficit since 2004. The crisis that has been affecting the global economy for the past 4 years might force the Chinese authorities to boost home consumption to be able to maintain the economic growth. This move would mean more imports and might have big consequences on food international trade in the years to come.

The article analyses the short term and structural causes of the explosion and collapse of agricultural prices. It exempts China and India and underlines the U.S. and EU responsibilities: agrofuels, financial speculation, lower ending stocks of cereals, their food trade deficit and the EU deficit in cereal trade in 2007-08. The article reminds the structural mechanisms having undermined the agricultural economies of developing countries, victims of food riots, following the progressive liberalization of agricultural trade.

How to explain the recent developments in the prices of agricultural raw materials? This article tries to trace the chronology of events and identify the mechanisms by which factors of change in agricultural prices act. From this analysis of temporal and causal effects an important lesson emerges, namely the difficulty if not the impossibility to isolate the responsibility of a particular determinant, even more to quantify it. Hence also the need to develop the economic analysis of agricultural prices, of their trends and determinants, including through the use of quantitative structural models, i.e., models that explicitly derived suplly and demand functions from behaviours of private and public actors.