Britain is not the only country suffering freak weather. In Australia, a drought has been followed by floods; the American Midwest has a chronic water shortage; southern Europe is enduring record high temperatures; bad weather has destroyed harvests in Romania, Ukraine and Canada.
If dire warnings about global warming are accurate, such events could become far more prevalent. And that is one of the factors which has stimulated investors' interest in agricultural commodities - wheat, orange juice, soya beans, sugar and so on. It has been a long time coming: for almost 25 years, the price of such commodities has been falling steadily, so much so that we pay less for many basic foods than our grandparents did.
Christopher Wyke, commodities product manager at Schroders, thinks we are at the start of a long bull run - and not just because of the weather; while that could just as easily produce bumper crops as bad harvests, other factors are having a bigger impact.
The first of these was underlined last week when BP and Associated British Foods announced a £200m biofuels plant near Hull. They are not the only ones eager to turn wheat into ethanol: Brazil's resurgent economy is based on using sugar crops to make fuel; the US government wants to increase its biofuels production by 900 per cent to cut dependence on imported energy; and the UK government is demanding that 5 per cent of motor fuel sales be from biofuels by 2010. That is raising demand for commodities that can be turned into fuel.
A second factor is more familiar to followers of the commodity story. Just as increasingly affluent Chinese and Indian consumers are demanding more consumer goods, they also want to consume more. Not only are they directly consuming more food commodities, they are also eating more meat - and producing one tonne of that requires nine tonnes of grain. Third, the amount of land dedicated to food production is falling. China alone has lost 9 per cent of its agricultural land to industrial use.
However, Ian Henderson, manager of JP Morgan's Natural Resources fund - one of few commodity funds easily accessible to retail investors - thinks supply concerns can be overdone, pointing out that across Europe farmers are still being paid not to grow anything.
While it can take a decade to find metals and extract them from mines, crops take just a season to mature. Even if you accept the bull arguments for agricultural commodities rising, gaining exposure to them is not straightforward. Mainstream funds such as Natural Resources tend to invest in resources companies, and there are few quoted agricultural companies around. But Henderson thinks the prices of many quoted mining, metals and energy companies are still undervalued so, even without much agricultural exposure, the fund looks attractive.
