Goddamn those greedy Chinamen. If only they would stick to their proper diet of boiled rice and the odd bamboo shoot, it would keep down the cost of our burgers. That just about sums up the attitude of Westerners to rising food inflation: the reason your weekly trolley-load from Tesco costs 15 per cent more than it did this time last year is because the Chinese and Indians have had the audacity to adopt Western-style diets, thereby inflating the price of the cereals required to feed the extra cows and pigs.

While there may be some truth in this analysis, we might just recognise the role played in food inflation by the shrinkage of our own agriculture. In 1996 68.6 per cent of all food consumed in the UK was produced here. By 2006 that had fallen to 59.5 per cent. Here are some more figures that you won't hear from the mouth of Gordon Brown, who normally spews statistics

like a Soviet bureaucrat with an obsessive-compulsive disorder: the land dedicated to cereal production fell from 3.4 million hectares in 1996 to 2.8 million hectares in 2006. Head of cattle fell from 11.7 million to 10.2 million and pigs from 7.9 million to 4.9 million.

If the fall in agricultural production over the past decade were a natural, market reaction to falling prices that will swiftly be reversed now that food prices are rising again it wouldn't matter. Yet subsidies are still distorting the market just as much as they were a decade ago. The only difference is that instead of giving farmers bungs to produce large quantities of the wrong sort of food, we are now paying them to grow hedges, create nice homes for dormice or grow “biofuel” for the diesel engines of the nation's 4x4s; virtually anything, in fact, other than producing food.

The “reform” of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy in 2003 was supposed to put an end to wine lakes and butter mountains, the handiwork of the dead hand of the State. Yet bizarrely, taxpayers are made to cough up just as much as before. Farmers now qualify for handouts either through environmental work or simply by keeping their land “in agricultural condition”. It is extraordinary how many City slickers have realised that they can supplement their meagre wages by buying a farm and half-heartedly pulling a plough across it once in a while or by grazing a few ponies. In the year after the introduction of the new CAP regime the number of “farmers” in Britain mysteriously rose from 80,000 to 120,000.

We are paying for these idiotic reforms twice over: once through our taxes and again through our shopping trolleys. If you want to look for the cause of food price rises, don't start in the burger bars of Beijing: look at the wheatfields-turned-manicured paddocks of Berkshire.

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