2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  the price fluctuations over the past ten years” and that “for many commodities, the expansion of supply has fallen short of buoyant demand”.2 Graph 1  This buoyant demand for agricultural commodities is underpinned by rising food consumption per capita as incomes rise, particularly in Asia (Graph 2).
Since the early 1960s, the number of kilojoules consumed on average per person across the planet has increased by almost 30 per cent. In China, the rise in average food consumption has been particularly pronounced, with food consumption per capita more than doubling over the past 50 years.