When Americans sit down to their Thanksgiving dinner in three weeks’ time, they will not be expressing gratitude for the surging price of the food on the table. The price of only one main ingredient in the traditional meal has remained stable over the past year. The turkey, cranberry sauce, green beans, ingredients for the pastry for pumpkin pie, ice-cream on top, and the cheese to go with crackers, have all soared in price. Only potato has held steady.

A global shortage of dairy produce and a doubling of the price of corn in the past 12 months has propelled food price inflation to its highest rate in America since the early 1990s.

Corn prices have shot up because energy companies are buying the grain to produce ethanol. While America this year produced about 200 million barrels of the clear, clean biofuel, the process withdrew 10 per cent of supplies from US grain stores.

Corn is crucial to America’s food industry. Half of it is used as animal feed, so the soaring price has lifted the cost of maintaining dairy and beef herds, poultry farms and piggeries. The oil price – which hit $96 a barrel on Thursday – means that the cost of distributing food has also climbed.

David Smith, who rears 18,000 chickens and 6,000 turkeys a year on his farm in Maryland, said: “The turkey meat price is up about 50 cents per pound compared with this time last year. We’ve had a 47 per cent rise in feed costs over the last year. A bushel of corn last Christmas was $2.40, now it’s $4. Of course we’ve put the price up. You can only absorb some of that without passing it on.”

According to statistics from the US Department of Agriculture, the milk price in September hit $3.84 a gallon, its highest level in nominal terms, since the beginning of the Second World War. The raw milk price has also lifted the price of other dairy produce such as yoghurt, cheese, ice-cream and chocolate. Hershey, the biggest chocolate maker in the world, this year warned that profits would be lower than expected because of the surge in raw material costs.

Americans are paying more for milk because of a global fall in supply of dairy produce just as the Chinese adopt Western diets. The surge in demand for dried milk, and milk protein products from China coincided with a drought in Australia, hitting dairy herds, and a change in the subsidy system in Europe for dairy farmers. EU dairy exports sank, and Australia, once an exporter of milk, became a net importer. The world looked to American dairy farmers to top up the milk market, but because so many US farmers in the past few years had experienced appalling returns, a record number had gone bust.

Few expect food prices to fall. Carl Weinberg at High Frequency Economics said: “There is no short-term remedy unless we eat less. The surge in the grain price is a global phenomenon and is moving through the food chain down to the supermarket shelves. But what is a mere economic inconvenience to wealthy nations means less food on the table for developing countries.”

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