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International food commodities
Food prices rose 5.8%.
Dairy fell 19.1%.
The global average hides a split. Vegetable oils climbed 18.3% in a year while dairy moved sharply the other way. Change the starting point to see which story survives.
September 2025 to September 2026
Change in nominal price index (%)These are international commodity prices, not supermarket prices. The overall index uses FAO export weights; it is not the simple average of these five groups.
Follow the split through time
Same starting line. Different destinations.
The selected category and the overall food index both start at 100 in your comparison month. A value of 120 means a 20% rise from that month. Tap the plot, or focus it and use the arrow keys, to inspect any month.
Dairy
separate the annual changes in vegetable oils (+18.3%) and dairy (-19.1%) in September 2026. Switch the comparison to March 2022: the overall food index is 15.1% lower, but meat is 7.2% higher. A falling global index does not mean every commodity got cheaper.
Open all 441 months and six price indices
January 1990 to September 2026. Original nominal index levels, 2014-2016 = 100. Latest meat observations mix projected and observed prices; overall food values can also be revised. No missing values in this snapshot.
| Month | Food | Meat | Dairy | Cereals | Oils | Sugar |
|---|
Sources and method
- FAO Food Price Index, release of 2 October 2026. The latest published month is September 2026. Next scheduled release: 6 November.
- FAO monthly nominal indices, official CSV, retrieved 19 October 2026. All 441 rows are embedded here. The downloadable file preserves the original values plus source and revision metadata.
Percentage change = (end index / start index - 1) × 100. Displayed changes round to one decimal; plots use unrounded calculations. The history view rebases each series separately to 100 in the selected start month. Earlier plotted months are context, not part of the selected comparison. The default plot begins in January 2019; select the full history to see 1990 onward.
FAO combines five commodity groups using average export shares in 2014-2016. Recent meat indices use both observed and projected prices and are subject to revision, which can also revise the overall food index. Calculations here use the downloaded CSV throughout, whose revised historical values can differ slightly from the release text. Indices are nominal, not adjusted for inflation.