With Christmas and New Year shopping now in full force around the Clarence region, Russia’s modern-day warlord, Vladimir Putin, can generally be blamed for us wincing over the higher cost of many essential and luxury foods on our household shopping lists.

Those many readers who have of late been disgruntled over the extent of their grocery shopping receipts may be interested to read about Putin’s proclaimed “silent weapon” as spelled out by his associate, Dmitry Medvedev.

This secret international measure was carefully designed to make all farmers in Australia and elsewhere in the West pay up to 40 per cent more for their essential food cropping fertilisers.

After declaring war on Ukraine, Moscow realised more than ever that the country they were invading was a world food basket and what better way to punish Russia’s enemies and the rest of the world than by cutting off a good deal of Ukraine’s extensive grain, cooking oil and general food exports?

In addition to this, Putin and his government advisers also knew only too well that Russia is the world’s top producer of all potassium, nitrogen and phosphate fertilisers.

This led them to further realise that they could seriously damage the West’s economy in general by creating shortages and heavily increasing their fertiliser prices — and so cause greater food inflationary costs in Europe, the U.S., Australia and elsewhere through the Western world.

The record high prices now being charged for fertiliser here and elsewhere in the West have added an estimated 25 per cent to the recent cost of many major essential foods in our supermarkets, grocery stores and butcher shops.

Before Putin’s current war, most of Ukraine’s valuable agricultural exports were transported by sea. More recently, however, Russia’s military commanders decided to block Ukraine’s Black Sea ports and bring all these basic food exports to a virtual standstill.

As a result of Putin’s invasion of his neighbours, Ukraine farmers have already lost a good proportion of their most fertile fields as their farms have succumbed to the various recent theatres of war.

A consequence of this is that Ukraine’s farmers are now only able to sow 2.5 million hectares of farmland compared to 17 million hectares prior to hostilities. This fact alone ensures that the world will seriously suffer grain shortages, and world food prices will continue to give our grocery purses a headache of some sort for some months yet to come.

While Australia’s food prices are now officially suffering a 7.5 per cent hike above their normal level, leading world food economists recently warned of “a further unprecedented monetary attack” against the global food system.

The experts who signed this recent declaration were representatives of the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organisation, the World Food Program, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank Group and the World Trade Organisation.

These influential world bodies warned that continuing negative world events will further affect food supplies and prices and will hit the most vulnerable in society the hardest. In Australia, this group is represented by the 3.3 million people who at present live below the breadline income of $467 a week.

All is not, however, doom and gloom. Food inflation is expected to drop a little by the end of next year, according to an analysis by Australia’s Trading Economics’ company.

Some of our Australian food producers also believe that the coming new year of 2024 will later see a small reduction in the price of some staples as a result of their switching to alternative suppliers here and overseas. 

The Australian farming sector is also reportedly working on securing more reasonably priced fertilisers, and the principal supermarket chains are increasing the scope of their less expensive ‘home brand’ selections.

A recent NielsenIQ study has shown that 45 per cent of Australian shoppers in all States are currently switching to the home brand options offered by all five of our major supermarket groups.

While we on the Clarence are individually faced with having to take end-of-year action by employing more cost-saving techniques to make our household budgets stretch further, leading economic experts have some additional positive news.

For instance, another recent study by NielsenIQ shows that 80 per cent of Australian shoppers are also reducing their weekly grocery lists by cutting out the less nutritious, but tasty, food products they normally buy, without any apparent ill effect to their health.

Grocery executives claim that, if this trend continues, the cost of more important food products will be encouraged to drop as many of these easily out-of-date lines are more expensive to stock due to spoilage and the exceptionally large variety demanded by, we price hungry shoppers.