How to profit from rising soft commodities prices

The price of an average basket of supermarket food has risen 12% in the past year. And with the Chinese embracing Western diets and the Americans embracing biofuels, food prices will continue to soar.

Times are tough in Japan. Not only do its residents have to put up with regular doses of bad economic data and a stock market that unjustly has spent the year so far in freefall, but now the prices of most of their favourite foods are soaring too.

I mentioned the shock rise in mayonnaise prices across Japan in this column last year (the Japanese appear to find that the taste of most things can be improved with a dollop), but this is nothing compared with what's going on with the price of milk.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.