How can the current food crisis be analysed using micro economics?

Question

What roles does the supply and demand curves play?

How about the long-run and short-run theories?

What about stuff like perfect competition, monopoly, etc... how do these apply.

Answer 1

Increase in population (aka demand for food) shifts the supply curve outwards.

Increase in oil/gas prices increases costs for producing outputs, thus cost curves and overall, the supply curves shifts upwards.

Droughts and unexpected weather changes has decreased output of crops, driving the supply curve also inwards

These effects drive the price of food upwards (a lot).

Things like quotas are also s******g up the food problem since the economy isn't working efficiently in that sense but when firms want to make profits, what can you do.  Long-run, all firms still want to make money so they'll work towards producing until they reach MES.  I'm not really sure how you can relate monopoly, since food is definitely NOT a monopoly- thousands of sellers worldwide.  It's closer to perfect competition, where each firm doesn't have much power to alter prices, since you can jack up prices and hope to get away with it, though food in developed countries is definitely more expensive than in developing ones.

However, I think you'll see most if it with just demand and supply curves.

[Answer: see above]