“Don’t look now, but the good times may have just stopped rolling,” the economist Paul Krugman wrote in his New York Times column. The Economist was more strident: “The era of cheap food is over,” it declared. World Bank President Robert Zoellick, reaching back to policies created during the Great Depression for inspiration to address food inflation, is pushing a “New Deal” for global food policy, aimed at aiding impoverished countries with income support and help in producing crops.

I don’t want to alarm anybody, but maybe it’s time for Americans to start stockpiling food.

No, this is not a drill.

You’ve seen the TV footage of food riots in parts of the developing world. Yes, they’re a long way away from the U.S. But most foodstuffs operate in a global market. When the cost of wheat soars in Asia, it will do the same here.

As the price of oil climbs to $117 a barrel and petrol at the pump reaches 110p a litre, motorists are wondering how long this latest spike is going to last. Is it just another of those temporary jumps in the cost of fuel that we saw in the 1970s and 1980s or is this a new reality which will last for good?

The answer is that it is likely to stay. While market prices may or may not continue shooting into the stratosphere over the next few months, they are certainly incapable of falling back down to the levels of $60-$70 a barrel seen even a year ago.

The reason is that oil supply is increasingly constrained by extraction costs while demand, fanned by the growth of huge emerging economies like China and India, is remorseless. The International Energy Agency forecasts that in 2008, the world will need an extra 1.3 million barrels a day (bpd), but only 800,000 extra bpd will be supplied.

Many parts of America, long considered the breadbasket of the world, are now confronting a once unthinkable phenomenon: food rationing. Major retailers in New York, in areas of New England, and on the West Coast are limiting purchases of flour, rice, and cooking oil as demand outstrips supply. There are also anecdotal reports that some consumers are hoarding grain stocks.

At a Costco Warehouse in Mountain View, Calif., yesterday, shoppers grew frustrated and occasionally uttered expletives as they searched in vain for the large sacks of rice they usually buy.

During the past week, the surge in oil prices continued with crude, gasoline and diesel prices all hitting new highs.

The great irony in all this is that the problem is simple to understand. World crude oil production has been essentially flat for the last three years while 1.3 billion Chinese, 1.1 billion Indians, and another quarter billion or so living in oil exporting countries continue to increase their oil consumption at a prodigious pace. Incidentally, the Chinese just announced that their diesel imports during the first quarter of 2008 were up seven fold over 2007.