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FAO says world food prices up almost 7 pct in August

Xinhua, September 9, 2016 Adjust font size:

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said Thursday that the prices of staple food prices rose in August, up nearly 7 percent from the same period of last year, a UN spokesman said here.

The FAO Food Price Index said that the jump came even as grain prices fell and global cereal production is expected to increase, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said a daily news briefing here.

The FAO Food Price Index averaged 165.6 points in August, up 1.9 percent from July and almost 7 percent from a year earlier. The monthly jump was mostly driven by cheese and palm oil quotations, while those for wheat, maize and rice all fell.

FAO raised considerably its world cereal production forecast for 2016 to 2 566 million tonnes, up 22 million tonnes from July projections. FAO's Cereal Supply and Demand Brief, also released on Thursday, attributed the increase primarily to anticipation of a record global wheat harvest this year and a large upward revision to this year's maize crop in the United States of America.

The expected increase in grain output is forecast to boost inventories and push up the global stock-to-use ratio to 25.3 percent, an "even more comfortable (supply and demand) situation than predicted at the start of the season," FAO said.

The FAO Food Price Index is a measure of the monthly change in international prices of a basket of food commodities. Enditem