无论是肉，生产，面包还是乳制品，都没有逃离通胀压力的单一食品类别。最近，根据U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data。
Supply chain disruptions那劳动力短缺那and higher fuel and transportation costs have all fed into the increase. Extreme weather has as well, and it has led to shortages of major crops, fromdurum wheat到citrus。More recently, Russia's assault on Ukraine has devastated regional food supply chains, caused major CPG companies tohalt operations和投资，并引发了全球商品的价格飙升小麦和大豆。
But despite this chaotic picture for food prices, Michael Swanson, chief agricultural economist at Wells Fargo, believes that many — but not all — of these issues will sort themselves out in the coming months. Swanson spoke to Food Dive this past week to share his take on the current state of inflation, its main drivers, and "the biggest mistake" that food CPGs could make as they try to navigate the price volatility. What follows are highlights of that conversation.
编辑注意：这次采访是为了清晰度和简洁而编辑。
FOOD DIVE:February’s消费者价格指数数据显示不同商品的通货膨胀水平，但这是在俄罗斯入侵之前真的开始影响事情。走向前进，在价格上涨是否会集中出来？
迈克尔·斯旺森：A couple of things come to mind that I think are a little bit different than what you would hear generally. One is when we look back at the current inflation, we're seeing food at home running at 8.7% year-over-year, which of course everybody knows is a multidecade high for food inflation. That's not a result of a shortage of ingredients — it’s hard for a lot of people to really believe that. The price increases we're seeing today, those were negotiated back in November, December and January between the food manufacturers and the food retailers. What we're seeing there was the labor and the transportation and the packaging costs being passed along. So we really haven't had a food shortage or food scarcity. Food inflation to date has represented almost entirely that transformation process of turning what we already had abundantly into what we want to eat.
食物潜水：您是否看到任何特定商品价格较高的复杂因素？
SWANSON:Absolutely: protein, which has led the way in the food inflation spike of 2020 during COVID and the current spike. Basically when you talk about protein, you're talking about transforming corn and soybean meal and other basic feed grains and into animals. And when you see the price that we have for the feed range right now, for the people that have the livestock that have to buy that, they're obviously going to be catching a new wave of price inflation. And you're concentrating higher-price grain and multiplying it by that multiplier effect of the protein. So, yes, we would expect that meat, poultry and dairy to really compress their margins and also pass along at higher costs, because you can't run that sector without the higher price of corn and soybeans.
FOOD DIVE:小麦的价格十年来击中他们的最高点在俄罗斯入侵之后。与俄罗斯和乌克兰responsible for 29% of wheat exports，您是否有深入了解将来动态变化如何？
SWANSON:L.等回去讨论一些事情,the general public doesn't understand. First, the United States exports wheat, has and always will, so we’re not an importer. But that doesn't mean we're insulated from the world market. If a grain operation can export wheat at a higher price, they will do so and then the domestic market has to match it. And so the run up in wheat prices is almost entirely the fact that the rest of the world is going to be short due to the missing Ukraine and Russian wheat. Not us — we still grow way more wheat than we need.
Having said that, we produce a very high-quality wheat, the United States grain handling system. I used to work for Cargill. It's clean, it's high quality, it's sorted, well handled. So, it's highly prized by a lot of the wealthier countries around the world. So that definitely is going to push up the price of flour.Flour equals higher-price bread flour, higher-price flour equals higher-price chips and crackers, as well as pasta. So there's no way to hide from that global trade problem.
FOOD DIVE:What about prices for other food commodities such as corn and soy, which have also trended upward?
SWANSON:以下是我一直与大量购买经理分享的一些数字，只是为了把事情放在上下文中：乌克兰和俄罗斯在全球80亿的两个国家有190万人，所以他们有2.4％的人口在全球。他们占全球农业生产的3.6％。这意味着他们有盈余 - 这就是为什么他们在出口市场中很重要。所以它很漂亮，非常类似于他们的总体，但它们的全球小麦产量的14.6％ - 11.3％在俄罗斯，3.3％在乌克兰。这就是为什么他们是小麦市场的重要组成部分。
因此，俄罗斯是玉米市场的一部分 - 占全球贸易和生产的3.8％ - 但它们肯定不应该是一个价格。但是，我们的目前的流动到了国内价格模式，基于相对较小的市场。现在[for]小麦，他们是一个更大的小市场。
One thing you hear with no context is that Ukraine does 80% of the world's trade in sunflower oil. Yes, but sunflower's like 3% of the total edible oil market. So they're a big player in a very small piece of that market. It's not like they're Malaysia with palm oil. They're nowhere near that type of influence there.
So once again, the market is panicked between the canola trade and that soybean trade. I'm not going to say you can stand against the market in the short term, but certainly the numbers themselves don't justify the amount of volatility we've seen in the market, on a historical basis.
FOOD DIVE:Do you see any of the major factors causing price increases right now abating in the coming months?
SWANSON:这是令人惊讶的，但我们现在有更多的卡车驾驶比我们以前拥有过更多的卡车驾驶。我们现在有更多的人在粮食制造中工作而不是我们以前的粮食制造。所以他们能够雇用足够的人。上周我和几个生产商在一起，我总是问：“你的劳动力是什么？”他们说，令人惊讶的是，他们总是喜欢拥有一些善良的人，但他们过去一年零时间的情况很快，他们在那里连续地履行短员工。所以如果你是人民合伙人和不断的人员配置，那么开始缓慢的工资压力就是不必要保持竞标更高更高的。这并不意味着你倒退，但我看到了一些好事发生。
We're seeing a recovery in the manufacturing floor and in the trucking industry, which really is going to help take away some of those major constraints that are really pushed up on food inflation. Now we're going to be dealing with higher ingredient costs, kind of the second wave here, but we will be dealing with both of them at the same time.
FOOD DIVE: So c应该改善劳动力问题抵消了成分短缺的影响？
SWANSON:Absolutely — and things that don't repeat themselves. For example, last year we had that freeze in Texas that impacted the packaging availability, the petrochemical complex. It doesn’t look like we’re going to have that again this year. I heard that some of the container traffic delays are down. Container prices are still high, but those can drop dramatically. As we unkink a lot of these supply chain issues ... that's going to be really helpful because that was the genesis of the first wave of inflation. If it doesn't continue, then they'll be able to absorb the ingredient cost a lot better.
FOOD DIVE: What advice do you have for food CPGs in the months ahead as they try to navigate this highly volatile pricing environment?
SWANSON:关于“不在流中间切换马的旧的说法让您免于潮湿”适用于当前的环境。由于波动性和成本上升，许多CPG已经重新分为他们的对冲策略。希望在价格上涨和波动之前，他们在“套期保值”之前。这意味着他们从该保护中受益，并在未来，他们将处理其预算的下跌。最大的错误是将他们的对冲和风险管理转换为“为围栏摇摆”，这是基于他们知道接下来发生的事情的信念。没有人能知道不可知的，但令人惊讶的是，有多少人不接受现实。关键是确保他们的篱笆实际上做了他们应该做的事情，也不会变成猜测。
