And at the international level, this graph
would depict the world market, not the market
within those individual countries.
But outside that group of countries,
that would have reduced supply somewhat
and helped to push up prices.
And we've already observed that there
wasn't a really notable reduction in supply
at the international level.
So the contribution probably wasn't that big.
But it probably did make some contribution.
One analysis by economists from the World Trade Organization
and the International Monetary Fund
suggested that prices would have been 13% lower
without these restrictions.
Not the major factor, but possibly one of the factors.
Next was panic buying.
A number of countries decided that they would try and buy up
grain rapidly-- more than they needed in the current year--
to try and build up stocks to contain domestic prices.
And that included Bangladesh, Nigeria, some Gulf countries,
and the Philippines.
Unfortunately, this wasn't a well-implemented policy,
and it resulted in some quite large losses of food, wastage
of food that went off in storage.
And in the short term, what that would have done
was push up the demand curve, as you can see here.
And in this graph, I've got a very steep supply curve.
I've shown it that way, because in the very short term--
and this panic buying would have been something that happened
in the short term-- the ability to respond and change supply
is quite limited.
So the supply curve becomes quite steep.
And that means that an increase in the demand curve,
like what we can see here, would have a significant increase
in the price of a commodity.
And you can see that that's happened
this graph-- an increase in price from P1 to P2,
and a smaller increase in the quantity from Q1 to Q2.
We expected this probably did make
at least a temporary contribution to higher prices.
But again, not the major factor.
And we observed that this panic buying
has subsided subsequently.
But you'll see later on in this segment
that prices have remained reasonably high,
or they've gone back to being high at times, even
without this panic buying.
So panic buying may have made a contribution,
but, probably, again, wasn't the major factor.
The next one that's been proposed
is increased demand for food in Asia.
We know there have been higher incomes
in various Asian countries, particularly in China.
And history shows us that when people in countries
develop high incomes, get higher incomes,
they often increase their demand for meat.
And that has been observed in China.
And the higher demand for meat leads
through to a higher demand for grain
to be used to feed to animals.
And for beef cattle, a particularly important feed
grain is soya beans.
If that happens, again, we would expect an increase
in demand for grain.
And you can see in this graph, we've
got the demand curve moving upwards and to the right.
And that's resulting in an increase
in the price and an increase in the quantity of production.