Q. What are some of the foods that have seen the most dramatic rise in prices? One federal report [PDF], for instance, shows that the price of eggs increased nearly 30 percent in 2007.

Ramsey: I saw that about eggs as well. Egg prices have moved up and down a fair bit. There's volatility about all of our prices.... Every couple months we may have a new group that we would throw into that in terms of year-over-year change in price. These are food prices that do hit home fairly quickly -- eggs, milk, cereal.

It is interesting when you look at cereal prices, if you were just to net out the change in the grain price you wouldn't come up with that big of a change in the whole box of cereal. But the reality is that the marketing costs, the transportation costs and so many of the other pieces of the puzzle have changed pretty dramatically as well. We do see some pretty good bump-up in the whole spectrum of food prices.

Q. Can you put the food crisis in the context of other major problems facing the U.S., most notably the financial meltdown?

Ramsey: If we're talking about how it affects just the United States, I think the financial crisis is more important. The kinds of inflation and food costs that we're talking about in the U.S., they're significant by historic measures, meaning if we're used to, say, 2 percent growth per year and now we're going to see 5, 6 maybe for the next year or so -- that's 250 percent increase in the rate of change, but it's still kind of nominal compared to how big the financial crisis is, at least right now.

Q. Can you put the food crisis in context of the major problems the rest of the world is facing?

Ramsey: It's definitely a bigger problem in other countries. When we say other countries, we need to talk about countries that spend a large proportion of their disposal dollar on food.... The U.S., Western Europe -- it's not as important, because they don't spend that much of their disposal income on food. But you go to Africa, Asia, parts of the Pacific Rim, countries that have much lower incomes, and they spend upwards of 50 percent of their disposal income on food. The kind of price increases we've seen on the real core staples -- grains, rice, things that are almost directly consumed -- those price changes translate into very direct hits to those consumers.

Q. What are some top causes of the rise in global food prices?

Ramsey: The top one is a lot of the growth in income and diets and the demand for food in, particularly, Asia -- China, India to a lesser extent. Their diets have changed pretty dramatically. They're requiring a lot more protein; that protein's basically being fed to their livestock sector and ultimately consumed as meat when it gets to the consumer....

There was a speculative bubble, too. The real sharp run-up in commodity prices -- kind of like everyone was getting on the bandwagon -- prices started to move up for some fundamental reasons. And then the stock market hasn't been all that appealing for quite some time now, so there was a lot of speculative money going into commodities and a fair bit has since come out -- it affected oil, it affected wheat, rice, cocoa, coffee, sugar.

Q. What role does the biofuels industry play in rising food prices?

Ramsey: If we're going to place blame on the biofuels sector, there's folks that come out and say, well, we need to get rid of the mandates or reduce them. My challenge with that is that while that may take away some of the security blanket, maybe the floor underneath the demand, we're operating -- at least in terms of corn ethanol -- we're operating in a space where basically this product is competitive at the market. So removing the floor may take away a bit of a safeguard, but it's not just going to totally undercut the whole industry. It probably would have more effect on development of future, next-generation fuels, which would be probably the wrong thing to do.

[Reducing the mandate] would not make that big of a difference, at least not in the current environment. You would have to actually tax ethanol, or you would have to make it illegal to use a food product to make fuel, and I hope that sounds ridiculous....

We subsidized this industry, the biofuels industry, so that it could get on its feet; it did. So it would develop technologies to make it continuously more efficient; it has. And now it's competitive. The fix to that is that food prices might actually have to rise a little bit more to make food just out-compete fuel as a demand source for basic food commodities. Food will always win. That's my personal bias.

Q. How does the U.S. fit into the global context of facing rising food prices?

Ramsey: I do think the fingers often get pointed back to the U.S. for their corn ethanol industry. Couple different pieces of that: One, if you're in Brazil, you'd be saying, "You should be letting us import more ethanol from sugar cane." So, a Brazilian population might say, "We can make it less impactful if you just reduced your import tariff on ethanol."

If you're in Western Europe -- at least I've heard this -- they definitely point back at us and say, "Your ethanol industry is having a pretty big impact," when, gallon-for-gallon, their biodiesel industry has a more significant impact, because that's coming directly out of the food side of the equation. That's a food product -- vegetable oil -- being converted into fuel. Whereas corn -- not too many of us eat corn, maybe little corn chips, but we're talking about corn that goes into livestock feed....

If you look at the last couple years, when everybody said that the situation is about as bad as it's ever been if we're talking food-price inflation and the effects of biofuels, exports out of the U.S. have not really been reduced in terms of volume because of that. We've stepped up in terms of our production. So you could argue that the U.S. is going to hinder its ability to feed the rest of the world -- as a major breadbasket for the world. In the long run, there's probably some truth to that if we're going to convert it all into ethanol, but in the short run, that hasn't been the case. We're exporting as many bushels of corn, wheat and soybeans as we ever have. If anything, we've probably taken a little bit of a hit with cotton, which Asia is growing now, and the ground we don't put cotton in -- about 5 million acres -- we're planting corn and soybeans. It's not as cut-and-dry as we'd like it to be.

Q. Through what avenue do you see the next president addressing the food crisis, if at all, within the first few years of his administration?

Ramsey: I don't think the president is going to have to do a whole lot to change it. I don't think the president can do a whole lot to change it. What would be the most significant thing that the president might do or think that they might do?

We've heard a call for releasing acreage out of conservation reserve and allow that to be planted. That's an area where we do definitely have some land in the U.S. that we could bring back into production. And there's definitely going to be a tug-of-war, for good reason. Conservation groups, wildlife organizations, are going to say, "Look at the habitat we've created and what you're going to tear down by bringing that back into production." On the flipside, if you're a livestock producer and you're trying to get grain prices lower, you can argue that you should release as much of the land as possible.

Q: Can Congress help lower food prices?

Ramsey: No. They probably don't have any more power than the president. I'm sure that together they would say that's not quite true. The tools they have to work with, I don't think that -- the biggest tool out there to right this problem is technology. That's not a short-run tool, that's a long-run tool. The tide has changed a bit, and the best way to see this tide changing is to look over at Western Europe and their position on genetically modified crops. They're much more receptive today than they were six months ago or 12 months ago, and their process has actually started to speed up -- meaning acceptance of genetically modified imports.

Q. What are your projections for where global food prices will be in five years?

Ramsey: What we expect -- and this is based on U.S. food prices -- there are still some more high-inflation times ahead of us. Not higher than we've seen, but continued at a level that most people would say is not acceptable for the long run. That's probably here for maybe as much as the next 12 months. And that's the ripple-through effect of realigning livestock prices and egg prices and milk prices....

When you get further out, we do think that we're going to move back to a more acceptable 2 or 3 percent year-over-year food price inflation path. It's not going to be that smooth. We have these numbers that make it look like it's going to be a nice smooth ride. I'm sure there'll be bumps. The big picture that we think we've experienced is, we've seen a movement up to a new level in commodity prices. It's fundamental. There's not a lot of easy ways for them to move back down to where they were five years ago.