Bacon Inflation: What You Need to Know

• Joe Wertz
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  Joe Wertz was a reporter and managing editor for StateImpact Oklahoma from 2011-2019. He reported on energy and environment issues for national NPR audiences and other national outlets. He previously worked as a managing editor, assistant editor and staff reporter at several major Oklahoma newspapers and studied journalism at the University of Central Oklahoma.

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The Oklahoma Pork Council has issued a dire warning:

“Pork prices are going to rise in 2013, there’s just no way around it,” executive director Ron Lindsey tells the Shawnee News-Star‘s Carmen Bourlon.

Bacon will be most affected by the porcine price hike, though customers in the United States probably won’t suffer any pork shortages, Lindsey tells the paper. The United Kingdom might not be so lucky, he says.

So what’s driving up pork prices? It’s all about corn, which is a primary component of hog feed.

Corn crops across the country were wrecked by the drought, which is tightening supplies. Short corn supplies drove the price of corn futures to a “nominal all-time high” in August. But the prices are starting to fall because traders are worried that high prices could strangle demand, the Wall Street Journal reports:

Traders now are waiting for a final U.S. government estimate of the size of the country’s corn harvest, and for further signs of how much demand has been eliminated.

High corn prices mean more expensive feed, and “many producers are cutting back on hog production,” the Pork Council’s Lindsey tells the Shawnee paper.